Hybridization of CSA and PSO improves the efficacy of MPPT for solar photovoltaic array with partial shading

One critical issue in the tracking systems based on photovoltaic (PV) is how to harvest highest power of the photovoltaic array; particularly when the system is operating in partially shaded conditions (PSCs) or varying irradiances. This study proposes particle swarm optimization (PSO) hybridization and cuckoo search algorithm (CSA) methods for maximum power point tracking (MPPT). The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is validated and examined under various irradiance patterns. A comparison study in performance has been conducted between the proposed hybrid CSA-PSO method with the conventional P&O and PSO techniques. Several tests have been performed based on numerical simulations utilizing the programming software MATLAB/Simulink. The results demonstrated that the suggested hybrid technique yields smaller tracking time, higher power and greater efficiency than those of other traditional algorithms.