Presenting a New Sliding Mode Control Method for Maximum Power Point Tracking of PV Generators

In recent years, the use of photovoltaic generators for the production of electrical energy has become widespread. One of the important issues is the utilization of photovoltaic generators at the maximum output power point, considering the non-linear voltage-current characteristic of solar cells, is that various parameters affecting the voltage and current characteristics need to be controlled to reach the maximum output power point. This paper presents a nonlinear sliding mode controller for photovoltaic generator operation at the maximum output power point. The sliding surface is defined as the derivative of power with respect to the voltage, and the applied control signal to the system is extracted depending on the selected slide surface. The stability of proposed controller is proved using Lyapunov Method. Finally, numerical simulations are performed for different perturbations in MATLAB software and the performance of the proposed method is compared with the perturbation and observation methods. The results show the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared with the conventional perturbation and observation approaches.