A PSO-Based Optimization of a Fuzzy based MPPT Controller for a PV Water Pumping System

Abstract

As part of the sustainable development plan, there is a trend of shifting to a new energy paradigm, in which carbon-free technologies are being extensively used for renewable energy generation, transmission, and consumption. The driving force behind this energy paradigm are enabled by advancement in power switching devices and digital signal processing units that constitute power converters. However, to ensure energy efficiency and reliability from these power converters there is a need to maximum power point tracking (MPPT) in a PV system. To this end, conventional control such as incremental conductance, perturb and observe, constant voltage, load switching schemes find wide applications in distributed generation, microgrids, and power quality compensation. While much has been done to improve their performance, there remains a lot more to do to improve the performance of conventional control techniques for real-time application. In particular, poor performance and/or requirement for complete knowledge of model parameters as well as disturbances are the main drawbacks of conventional control methods. In this work, an alternative Perturb and observe (PO), Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC) scheme in power converters is designed and simulated in SIMULINK/MATLAB. Furthermore, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used for fine tuning the FLC inputs and output scaling gains. The total PV panel capacity is 32 kW to supply desired motor rating of 22 kW to supply water demand of 478.4 m3 /day at the head of 98 m in the flow rate of 49.2 m3 /h. Based on the simulation result for a hypothetical photovoltaic water pumping application demonstrate the efficiency has been 84.99%, 95.65%, and 96.5% for perturb and observe, Fuzzy Logic, and PSO-based Fuzzy controller respectively. So that the results confirm that the proposed PSO-based fuzzy controller methods have the potential to significantly increase the total efficiency of the PV water pumping system. It is recommended to apply hybrid PSO-based Genetic algorithm to improve the speed of convergence and the ability to find the global optimum in the future research investigation in this area