Earthquake Algorithm-Based Voltage Referenced MPPT Implementation through a Standardized Validation Frame

Abstract

This paper presents a new direct maximum power point tracking (MPPT) with a reference voltage (Vref) based on the metaheuristic earthquake algorithm (EA) where the optimization variable is the Vref for hard-switching converters. The efficiency and performance of EA-MPPT-Vref is compared with the perturb-and-observe (P&O) counterpart technique due to the fact that it is widely used for commercial products. Static and dynamic responses for both MPPT strategies are evaluated, which correspond to steady-state oscillations when they are near the maximum power point (MPP), and the tracking-speed, respectively. The efficiency was evaluated with the EN 50530 standard. The results show that the new MPPT proposed is a competitive method using the EA to obtain the optimal voltage reference. From static results, EA-MPPT VP presented a better efficiency of 5.13% and 3.23% for European and California energy commission (CEC) efficiency, respectively. Whereas, from dynamic results, MPPT-Vref techniques presented an efficiency from 95.13% to 99.91%, and 99.01% to 99.91% of the total power of the PV system for P&O and EA strategies, respectively.