Efficiency of Hybrid MPPT Techniques Based on ANN and PSO for Photovoltaic Systems under Partially Shading Conditions

Hybrid Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) algorithms have been investigated as an alternative to improve the performance of conventional MPPT, such as Perturb and Observe (P&O), Incremental Conductance (InC) and Hill Climbing (HC) in Photovoltaic (PV) systems under Partially Shading Co+ndition (PSC). In the present article, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) hybridized with P&O algorithm for MPPT are compared in terms of power efficiency. This paper not only compare hybrid MPPT methods against conventional MPPT, but also provide a comparison between two different hybrid techniques. In order to evaluate the performance of such hybrid methods, a PV system was computationally modelled and different PSC scenarios were implemented in MATLAB®/Simulink, as well as the hybrid methods ANN + P&O and PSO + P&O. The hybrid methods ANN + P&O and PSO + P&O successfully improve the efficiency of P&O algorithm, respectively achieving 98.93% and 92.96% on average in the PSC scenarios tested, whereas P&O achieved 88.27% on average in such scenarios.