A Maximum Power Point Tracking Method Using a Hybrid PSO and Grey Wolf Optimization Algorithm

Solar PV systems have become an indispensable part of the residents living in a country due to their simplicity, less pollution production and a lesser amount of money required for its installation. But due to their lesser efficiency and high power loss still there exist some issues in relying completely on this source of energy. Due to varying insolation conditions in a day and partial shading due to buildings, tree branches, etc. the rays coming from the sun cannot completely strike on the solar PV surface due to which high power losses occur. The bypass diodes that are used to mitigate the effect of partial shading creates multiple power peaks at the output terminal. Hence, in this paper, a nature-inspired algorithm which is a hybrid of PSO and Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) is used for tracking the maximum power among all the available power peaks. The proposed algorithm was compared with another state of the art algorithms (GSA and PSO Standard (PSOSTD)).