Design of a solar mpp tracker with modified perturb and observe method using arduino

Abstract

Design of a fast, improved and reliable solar Maximum Power Point Tracker (MPPT) is described in this work. The working algorithm was motivated from the existing Perturb and Observe method for tracking MPP of Solar Photovoltaic (SPV). The tracker was developed using an Arduino Uno development kit which is run by ATMega 328P microcontroller and clocked at 16MHz. Due to high frequency operation the model was fast and accurate and consumes very low power and can be driven by 5V only. Proteus 8.3 simulator was used and further a hardware model was designed in order to realize the operation. MPP was tracked very quickly and accurately in accordance with the change in solar irradiance. The tracker offered an efficiency of ranging from 96.40%-99.25% at different irradiance level.