FAULT-TOLERANT CONTROL OF PHOTOVOLTAIC PANELS

Abstract

In this work we present a fault-tolerant control strategy to extract the maximum power from photovoltaic (PV) panels. The performance of PV panels is affected with different type of faults such as mismatch, shading, cell degradation, different type of panels, soiling…. This faults result in multiple local maximum points in the P-V characteristic where the classical P&O MPPT algorithm is unable to achieve the global maximum power point. The proposed method is based on the use of a hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and a classical PI controller to achieve the maximum performance in the presence of different type of faults