A hybrid simulated annealing and perturb and observe method for maximum power point tracking in PV systems under partial shading conditions

This paper presents a hybrid method for Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) of a Photovoltaic (PV) system which experiences non-uniform environmental conditions or partial shading conditions. The hybrid method combines two simple techniques with complementary strengths in achieving Global MPPT. Simulated Annealing (SA) has only recently been applied to PV MPPT and is very effective at locating global maxima with limited implementation complexity. Perturb and Observe (P&O) is a very common technique which provides continuous tracking of the MPP in a simple and easy to implement manner. The P&O method is generally incapable of locating global maxima, and the SA based method is unable to perform continuous searching. By merging these techniques in a hybrid MPPT method consisting of a global searching stage and a local searching stage, the tracking performance is improved compared to what each technique could achieve independently. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid technique.