Vol. 2, Issue 12, Part A (2016)

Abstract
The increase in power demand is one of the major concerns in the power sector area. In the day to day operations it is difficult to meet out the power demands with the available resources using the conventional energy sources. In this aspect the demand has increased for renewable sources of energy to be utilized along with conventional systems to meet out the energy demand. Renewable sources like wind energy and solar energy are the prime energy sources which are being utilized in this regard. Solar energy is abundantly available that has made it possible to harvest it and utilize it properly. Solar energy can be a standalone generating unit or can be a grid connected generating unit depending on the availability of a grid. Thus it can be used to power rural areas and provide portable operations where the availability of grids is very low. In order to tackle the present energy crisis one has to develop an efficient manner in which power has to be extracted from the incoming solar radiation. The power conversion mechanisms have been greatly reduced in size in the past few years. The objective of the paper is to develop a MPPT based power management system for parallel connected PV arrays by integrating buck-boost dc-dc converter with single phase inverter. This paper proposes a new method for the MPPT control of PV systems. This method uses perturb processes in search of the maximum PV output. In this technique, the controller adjusts the output voltage of the PV cell based on its instantaneous output power. The incremental conductance algorithm uses the slope of the power-voltage curve of the PV cell to determine the voltage reference. The derivative of the cell output power with respect to the cell output voltage at the MPP is zero. This method requires more computations relative to the P&O but may reach the MPP faster.