Combined P&O MPPT and CC-CV algorithms for the design of a portable and efficient solar charging system

Abstract

Harvesting maximum energy from isolated photovoltaic systems is challenging. In this regard, a new hybrid algorithm, obtained from the combination of the perturb and observe MPPT and the constant current-constant voltage algorithms is proposed and serves for the design of a portable and efficient solar charging and power supply system. This latter consists of a microcontroller platform, DC-DC converters (buck and boost), voltage and current sensors, a linear regulator and a power demux. The experiments conducted with the designed solar charger and power supply showed that the proposed hybrid algorithm extracted 17% more power from the solar panels than the conventional MPPT while achieving an efficiency of 92%.