2016 IEEE First International Conference on Control, Measurement and Instrumentation (CMI)

Design, Modeling and Software Implementation of a Current-Perturbed Maximum

Power Point Tracking Control in a DC-DC Boost Converter for Grid-Connected Solar
Photovoltaic Applications
Abhisek Maiti#1, Kaushik Mukherjee #2, Prasid Syam #3,
Department of Electrical Engineering
Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology, Shibpur Howrah
#1
abhr4u.rs2013@ee.iiests.ac.in, #2kmukherjee@ee.iiests.ac.in,# 3ps@ee.iiests.ac.in

Abstract In this paper, a control scheme for tracking low PV panel voltage for connectivity with a higher AC grid
maximum power point for a solar photovoltaic (PV) panel voltage through an inverter. It also ensures that the current
feeding power to the three phase grid through an intermediate drawn from the PV panel is as continuous and ripple-free as far
boost converter followed by a grid-tie PWM inverter stage is as possible.
presented. The intermediate DC to DC boost converter small
signal model is derived considering the fact that its output
behaves as a constant DC voltage power sink. The selection
criteria for the inductor value for continuous current mode
operation and the capacitor at the PV panel output are discussed
at length. A separate controller, in addition to the maximum
power point tracking (MPPT) controller, is designed for the boost
converter based on its derived model to set the current value for
maximum power point tracking and presented. A method is also Fig.1. Block diagram representation of grid connected PV system
described here for choosing the sampling instances for getting
average inductor current in a cycle corresponding for MPPT
without using a filter. The analytical findings and simulation
results are well agreeing.

Keywords PV; MPPT; Small signal modelling; PI controller;

Current Perturb P&O algorithm .

INTRODUCTION
Sustainable energy sources are expected to play a
significant role in meeting the worlds energy demand, due to
their abundant availability and environment-friendly nature.
Solar photovoltaic (PV) power generation is currently
considered as one of the most effective renewable energy
source [1]. Based on application, solar PV systems are mainly
of two types: grid connected and off-grid stand alone system.
In both cases the main energy source is the PV array that
converts sunlight into a DC form of electrical energy. A PV
panel is an interconnected collection of cells combined as one
item. Multiple panels can be wired together either in parallel
or in series or in both to form an array or module. A typical
system block diagram for a grid connected system with
electrical isolation is shown in Fig.1 [2]. This is also known as
double stage configuration.
The main disadvantage of solar energy based electrical
power supply is that power generation is not constant
throughout the day, as it always changes with atmospheric
conditions [3].Further, the efficiency of solar energy
conversion to electrical energy is very low, only in the range
of 9-17%.Therefore, maximum power point tracking (MPPT)
is an essential part of a grid-tied solar PV system to ensure
that maximum available power is always extracted out of the
PV panel at all conditions and steered to the AC grid,
considered as an infinite sink of power ideally [4].
Generally, the boost converter is used to maintain loading
of the photovoltaic sources to such a level so as to extract
maximum power from the solar cells within a specific range of
practical atmospheric conditions. It helps in stepping up the
Fig.2. Schematic of direct and indirect perturbation based PV system
The inverter stage between the DC link and the AC grid
helps in changing the form of the electrical power, controlling
the DC link voltage and the active-reactive power transfer to
the grid. In literature, different MPPT algorithm are
introduced and among them the Perturb and Observe (P&O)
and Incremental Conductance are mostly used [2,5].The
double-stage PV system presented in Fig.2 is typically
operated in two operating modes: (a)to track the PV Maximum
Power Point (MPP)in each instant by perturbing the duty cycle
of the dc/dc converter and calculate the power with previous
instant. or(b) by perturbing the reference of a control loop
designed to regulate the PV voltage or current [6].The mode
(a) known as conventional method is simpler from the
implementation point of view because the MPPT is able to
track the MPP for any uniform irradiance condition, but it is
sensible to disturbances at the dc/dc converter output. Instead,
mode (b) is able to reject load perturbations and this is
essential for grid connected system. But its controller design is
difficult as it depends on the system parameters [3], [6]-[7].
In both mode (a) and mode (b) one of the basic challenges
for designing MPPT is that it should track the maximum
power without power oscillations around the operating point
for a range of specific atmospheric condition. For that it is
required to determine the optimized sample time interval Tafor
PV current or voltage sampling, so that, the converter reaches

Authors acknowledge Dept.of Electrical Engineering, IIEST, Shibpur

and TEQIP-II project for providing opportunity and infrastructural support to
carry out this research.

978-1-4799-1769-3/16/$31.00 2016 IEEE 36

 2016 IEEE First International Conference on Control, Measurement and Instrumentation (CMI)

the steady-state in each perturbation cycle under continuous

conduction mode(CCM) operation. Therefore, it needs proper
design of the passive components of the boost converter
properly. The other challenge is to design the controller for
efficient operation even under load voltage or load current
disturbances under transient condition for grid connected
system [5, 6]. Hence, analysis of converter dynamics using its
small signal model is required.
The current perturbed MPPT algorithm is considered
instead of voltage perturbation in this work for speeding up
the tracking [7]. The average current through the inductor is
the quantity to be controlled here according to the reference
current generated from MPPT controller. An external
capacitor has to be connected across the PV panel which Fig.3. System block diagram
provides a path for flowing the ripple current due to fast
switching of the device in the DC-DC boost converter and
maintains a reduce ripple voltage across the PV panel.
Additionally it will also ensure the initialization of the
controller from open circuit voltage condition. The boost
converter output voltage is maintained constant by the grid-
side inverter control as shown in Fig. 2.
In Section I, the details of proposed system are described
with block diagrams. In Section II, the basis of designing the
value of system components (input PV capacitor and inductor)
is addressed. In Section III, the system small signal modeling
is presented for determination of sampling time Ta essential for
implementing the MPPT algorithm and for deriving the boost
converters controller gains (Kp and Ki). In Section IV, current
perturbed P&O algorithm is described with simulation based
experimental verifications and Section V is devoted for
conclusions.
I. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION
The block diagram of proposed system is shown in Fig.3.
A 5kW PV module is selected here. The PV array consists of
10nos. of single37Wpanel (Table1) connected in parallel and Fig.4. Boost converter (a) Inductor current ripple (b) voltage ripple of the
16 nos. are connected in series to get the above module. capacitor connected across the PV module

Hence, boost converter output voltage i.e. the DC link

TABLE 1: SPECIFICATION OF SINGLE PANEL
voltage is maintained constant to appropriate level depending
Rated power 37.08W on the grid voltage with a separate controller used for the grid-
Voltage at maximum Power(Vmp) 16.56V tie inverter. For simulation purpose in this paper, a battery
Current at maximum power(Imp) 2.25A with a constant appropriate dc voltage is assumed to be
Open circuit Voltage(Voc) 21.24V connected at the output of the boost converter to mimic this
Short circuit Current(Isc) 2.55A
Total no. of cell in series(Np) 36
effect. This arrangement further emulates a condition where
Total no of cell in parallel(Ns) 1 the PV power can be extracted without any change of boost
The MPPT block takes the samples of PV voltage and current converter output voltage at the DC link. Hence, the output is
in each iteration and generates reference current Iref using not a physical load resistance, but for any operating point a
load resistance can be conceptualized as the ratio of voltage to
P&O algorithm. Comparator compares the reference current
the current flowing into the battery. Here the authors consider
with PV current which is eventually the average inductor
that the MPPT operates over irradiance(S) range of 1000-
current of the boost converter. A PI controller tries to 400W/m2and temperature (T) range of 90C-450C based on
minimize the error by adjusting the duty ratio of the switch local Eastern Indian weather conditions.
and brings the inductor current to the reference value. The
output of the PI block is compared with a fixed frequency II. SELECTION OF SYSTEM PARAMETERS
triangular wave signal which generates the required duty ratio The selection of inductor for boost converter plays a vital
of the PWM pulses for the boost converter. The proper value role for ensuring that for any duty cycle (D) within the
of the controller gain (Kp and Ki) is found out based on some considered range of weather conditions, the inductor current
performance criteria. In grid connected system, the boost always remains continuous (CCM) and is never discontinuous
converter output voltage is the DC input of the following grid- (DCM).
tie inverter stage.

37
 2016 IEEE First International Conference on Control, Measurement and Instrumentation (CMI)

Considering average inductor current be Il and IL is peak III. SYSTEM MODELLING AND DESIGN
current ripple as shown in Fig.4, L is inductance of the
inductor, R is the said conceptual load resistance, D is duty A. Converter modelling:
cycle and Ts(fs=1/Ts)is switching period. Ensuring continuous In control system modeling of the PV-converter system,
conduction (Fig.4.) and analysis discussed in [8],it can be voltage across input capacitance (at the PV output) and current
concluded, through the inductor are considered as state variables. The PV

current and the voltage across the conceptual load at the output
(1) of the converter are considered as input variables. Assuming

continuous conduction mode operation, circuit (Fig.5) can be

Where, =Rcrit analyzed to find small signal inductor current to duty ratio

transfer function Gi(s)and inductor current to DC link voltage
Hence, (2) transfer function Go(s).Hence,

Now, to maintain the constant d.c. link voltage of 400V,
Here the output voltage of Boost converter is maintained
with insolation varies from 400W/m2 to 1000W/m2 and
constant from inverter side and also no second harmonic
temperature varies from 90C to 450C, corresponding minimum
oscillation is expected to appear in DC link voltage as AC grid
inductor values are given in Table-2. The switching time
is assumed to be a balanced three phase system. Hence effect
period is chosen as Ts=0.0002 second(f=5kHz). For a value of
of Go(s) has been neglected here.
, the lesser the switching time period, less is the
inductance value needed [9]. During Switch-ON, from Fig.5(a),
TABLE 2: INDUCTOR VALUES FOR DIFFERENT CONDITIONS
Insolatio T Pmax Vpv IPV Duty Vout R=Vo2/P L
n. (0C) (W) (V) (A) (D) (V) () (mH)
(W/m2)
400 9 2311 158. 14.5 0.6 400 69.29 1.02
7 5 5
400 45 2235 153. 14.6 0.61 400 71.58 1.06
2 6 7
1000 9 5738 157. 36.5 0.60 400 27.88 0.41
2 6 7 3 (a) (b)
1000 45 5550 152. 36.3 0.62 400 28.82 0.42 Fig.5. PV converter model (a) Switch on (b) Switch off condition
7 5 6
From the table it is clear that 1.1(>1.06) mH is sufficient
for MPPT in different operating region ensuring CCM in all (8)

duty ratio.  (9)

Ci is designed to keep out the inductor ripple current to
flow through PV. Ripple component in inductor current 

(10)
flow through the capacitor and its average component Il

flow through PV. Let, is allowable peak to peak ripple  (11)

voltage across capacitor and is the average PV output (12)
voltage as illustrated in Fig.4.b. Therefore, the incremental  (13)
charge on capacitor Rewriting the dynamic equations (11) and (12) in state space
form in (14)
(3)


(4)


Again,




(5) (14)




During switch-ON, inductor current get changed il1 to il2
and =(il2-il1) and voltage across inductor which is the During Switch-OFF, from Fig.5 (b),
voltage across the PV panel can be expressed as, (15)

 (16)
 (6)

Using the value in equation (5)



(7)

Rewriting the dynamic equation (16) in state space form in
Considering, =0.01 at Dmax=0.6, L =1.1mH and =0.0002 (17),

sec. the value of Ci is calculated to be =272F.

38
 2016 IEEE First International Conference on Control, Measurement and Instrumentation (CMI)

(17)

The state and input matrixes are averaaged over a period

by multiplying the state and input matrrixes by the two
switched intervals duty ratios. The state and
a input matrixes
are averaged over a period by multiplying the
t state and input
matrixes by the two switched intervals duty ratios.
 (18)
After averaging, the system is perturbed arround a quiescent
operating point
( ;




. Fig.6. Bode plot forward pathh transfer function in open loop
Applying the Laplace transform annd separating the
equilibrium and perturbed components wiith neglecting the
second order terms, the following equationns for the steady-
state operating point for the dynamic or smalll-signal model are
obtained [9].
(19)

(20)
As the boost converter will operate undeer direct duty ratio
control to regulate the inductor current, the trransfer function of
incremental inductor current to incremenntal duty ratio is
Fig.7. closed loop control
c system model
obtained by considering the variations of thhe input matrix ()
to be equal to zero. The said transfer functtion is obtained as
follows.
(21)
Here, (22)
(23)

= (24)


(24) can be rewritten in matrix form,

(25)

Finally,

(a)
Gi(s)
(26)


Here the ESR of input capacitor and innductor values are
considered 50m and 100 m respecttively [9]. Fig.6.
illustrates the nature of Gi(s)for different quuiescent operating
points using Bode plots. For next analysiiss, two extreme
conditions of operating range are considered c here.
Condition1:S=400W/m2,T=450C; Conditioon2:S=1000W/m2,
T=90C.
For Condition1, it is shown that the openo loop transfer
function Gi(s)having Phase margin of 89.90 with Gain cross
over frequency 32 krad/sec. and in Conditioon2, phase margin
of 89.90 with gain cross over frequency 80.099 krad/sec. In both
cases positive gain and phase margin are inddicating stability of
the system in open loop. The form of the trransfer function of (b)
the system suggests that a PI controller em mployed with this Fig.8. Closed loop Bode plot of syystem: (a) condition1 (b) condition2
open loop system in the closed loop with negative
n feedback
and fed from a step reference inductor curreent input will lead B. Kp and Ki design:
to zero steady state error. To design the clossed loop controller Step-1: Considering that a repetitive triangular waveform
gain (Kp and Ki) following steps have been implemented and having peak magnitude of 12V V is compared with the control
can be explained through Fig. 7. signal ic to generate the duty ratio d(Fig.7).Now, finding out

39
 2016 IEEE First International Conference on Control, Measurement and Instrumentation (CMI)

the phase ( ) of the open loop forward pathh transfer function

Po(S), where,

(27)

For good transient response in closed loop to have less or
practically no oscillations, the phase marginn (PM) at the cut-
off frequency is desired to be within (450-6000), preferably 600
[9].Where,
(28)
Step-2: Finding out the magnitude (M M) of closed loop
transfer function Gcl at cut-off frequency c. Where,
(29) (a) (b)
here, assumed as 1/10th of the switching frequency, i.e. Fig.9. Closed loop step response of the current controller (a) System1 (b)
500 Hz. System2
A second criterion is that the magnitude (M) of the closed
loop transfer function is -3dB(0.707) at cut--off frequency. As
magnitude should be as high as possible for fast transient
response [9]
(30)
Step-3: To determine PI controller gains i.e. Kp and Ki , the
open loop response of system having two extreme
e conditions
of the operating environmental range are connsidered.
Step3: A Matlab program is written to solve the equations (28)
and (30) obtained from Step-1 and Step-2.. Using the above
criteria, Kp=0.046 and Ki=842.18. The closedd loop response of
system for both condition1 and condition22 with their Bode
plots is shown in Fig. 8a. and8b. with Kp and Ki gain.
C. Determination of sampling time for inducctor current:
Rapid variation in irradiance can occurr approximately at
the rate of 600 W/m2 per 0.1 sec [5]. Now the sampling time
for inductor current is chosen such a way thatt between each Fig.10. Current peerturbed P&O algorithm
MPPT perturbation cycles the converter with w PI controller
dynamics get over satisfactorily [6].To deterrmine sample time
for inductor current a step response off system in both
condition1 and condition2areanalyzedin closed c loop. The
results indicate that with a step input in eachh case, the system
settles in0.001sec. as shown in Fig.9a and Fig.9b. Assuming a
factor of safety of 8, the, sampling time (T ( a) employed for
sensing the inductor current by the MP PPT controller is
considered here as 0.008sec. Although a fixed duty ratio
perturbation (D=0.005) is considered in thhis paper, which is
eventually controlled by the fixed I comm mand (Fig.10), yet,
an optimized magnitude of the duty cycle peerturbation (D) is
often required [6]. A fixed small D reducees the steady-state
losses caused by the oscillation of the arraay operating point Fig.11. Strategic time instantt of inductor current sampling
around the MPP. On the other way, thiss sometimes may
increase the tracking time. To overcome this, an adaptive IV. CURRENT SAMPLING
GTECHNIQUE FOR MPPT
optimized variable step size (D) baased duty cycle In current perturbed MPP PT algorithm, PV voltage and
perturbation technique is suggested in literrature [5], [7]. In average inductor current are sampled
s with sampling time of
each of these cases, however, high samplee rate needs to be 0.008s to compute power suppplied by the PV panel in steady
ensured [5]. state. Here, ripple voltage acrosss PV capacitor is assumed to be
negligible, so the instantaneouss voltage and the average voltage
are nearly equal. But, althoughh inductor current attains steady
state, high switching frequencyy ripples are present in inductor
current which makes instantaneeous inductor current not equal
to the average inductor current for all time instants in a
switching cycle. However, as solar
s PV I-V characteristics can
be considered as almost static compared to much faster boost
converter dynamics, the averagge value of the inductor current

40
 2016 IEEE First International Conference on Control, Measurement and Instrumentation (CMI)
per switching cycle, instead of its instantaneous value should
be considered for tracking MPPT. Employing a low-pass filter
to extract this average component will call for extra
hardware/software and create a phase lag. To overcome this
problem, a triangular carrier wave is chosen in this work as the
modulator so that one inductor current sampling instant can be
found where the sampled current is equal to the average
current. This assumes that in one switching cycle, the PV
output DC value does not change and the inductor has
negligible ESR so that the inductor current waveform is also
triangular. The selection of the strategic time instant for
sampling is illustrated in Fig. 11. The control signal (vr)
generated from PI controller is compared with a triangular
waveform and sampling is done at the strategic instant shown
in Fig.11, which is the starting instant of the triangular wave
carrier having fixed time period (0.0002s). Eventually, the
selected sampling time (.008s) is also the integer multiple of
strategic time instant so that it remains synchronized.
V. RESULTS
Current perturbed P&O MPPT algorithm is used here.
Here, ripple voltage across PV capacitor is assumed to be
negligible, and same sampling time are selected for Voltage
vci(k) and current il(k). After sampling both are multiplied to
obtain the PV power P(k) at kth sampling instant.
The error between P(k) and P(k-1) determine the sign of
perturbation step size for duty cycle. The flowchart of the
proposed MPPT method is shown in Fig.10.
The complete system consisting of PV module, boost
converter, current controller and MPP tracking controller in
two different operating conditions are examined in simulation
In system1: VMPP=158V, IMPP=36.5A, PMPP=5.7kW and in
system2: VMPP=153V, IMPP=15A, PMPP=2.29kW.The results
indicate that the system tracks the MPP in each case as
illustrated in Fig.12.a and 12.b.
Fig.12. Settling of PMPP, VMPP and IMPP (a) System1 (b) System2
VI. CONCLUSIONS
The paper proposes a system which is used to extract
maximum power from a PV panel to feed a constant voltage
power sink and systematically presents the indirect
perturbation based maximum power point tracking for grid
connected PV system offering a good tracking performance.
The significant contributions are:
41
1. Finding out the small signal model of dc-dc boost
converter considering the fact that a grid connected
controlled inverter will maintain a constant voltage
sink at the dc-dc converters high voltage side and the
boost converter will always operate under continuous
conduction as discussed and detailed in subsection
III.
2. Proposing a technique to determine the value of
inductance of the DC-DC boost converter, based on
continuous conduction for the practical operating
range.
3. Proposing a methodology to determine the gains of
the PI controller used to set the inductor current as
dictated by the MPPT.
4. Proposing a methodology to justify the choice of the
sampling time
5. Proposing a sampling technique to determine the
average inductor current online by avoiding
additional low pass filter in the control circuit which
would have introduced phase delays, as discussed in
subsection IV.
However, the presented MPP tracking does not consider
the partial shading of the large panel for which multiple
maximum power points (local maxima) can emerge [10].
Work is continuing to propose a new solution to this problem.
REFERENCES
[1] IEA-PVPS, Trends in Photovoltaic Applications. Survey report of
selected IEA countries between 1992 and 2008, International Energy
Agency - Photovoltaic Power SystemsProgramme, Tech. Rep. IEA
PVPS T1-17:2008, August 2008.
[2] Sera, D., Mathe, L.; Kerekes, T.; Spataru, S.V.; Teodorescu, R. "On the
Perturb-and-Observe and Incremental Conductance MPPT Methods for
PV Systems", IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics, On page(s): 1070 - 1078
Volume: 3, Issue: 3, July 2013.
[3] Maria C mira, Arnold Kott, Ole C Yhomsen, Michael A E Andersen,
Boost converter with combined control loop for a stand-alone
photovoltaic battery charge system, IEEE 14th Workshop on Control
and Modeling for Power Electronics, June 2013
[4] "Photovoltaic Cell Conversion Efficiency". U.S. Department of
Energy.Retrieved 19 May 2012
[5] Fangrui Liu, Shanxu Duan, Fei Liu, Bangyin Liu and Yong Kang,
Variable step size INC MPPT method for PV systems, IEEE
Transactions on Industrial Electronics, Vol.55, No.7, July 2008
[6] Nicola Femia, Giovanni Petrone, Giovanni Spagnuolo and Massimo
Vitelli. A technique for improving P&O MPPT performances of
double-stage grid connected photovoltaic system. IEEE Transactions
on Industrial Electronics VOL. 56, 2009.
[7] Kollimalla,S.K,MishraS.K, A Novel adaptive P&O MPPT algorithm
Considering Sudden changes in the irradiance. IEEE Transactions on
Energy conversion VOL.29, Sept. 2014.
[8] R.Erickson, D. Maksimovic. Fundamental of Power Electronics. 2nd
Ed. Spinger. Norwell, United states of America.2001
[9] Ned Mohan, Tore M. Undeland, William P. Robbins.Power
Electronics: Converters, Applications, and Design,3rd Ed. Willey,
India, 2002.
[10] H.Patel,V. Agarwal, Maximum Power Point Tracking Scheme for PV
System Operating in Partial Shadding Condition.IEEE Transactions On
IndustrialElectronics,VOL.55,April2008.