A Distributed Approach to Maximum Power
Point Tracking for Photovoltaic Submodule
Differential Power Processing
Abstract—This paper presents the theory and implementation of
a distributed algorithm for controlling differential power processing converters in photovoltaic (PV) applications. This distributed
algorithm achievestruemaximum power point tracking of seriesconnected PV submodules by relying only on local voltage measurements andneighbor-to-neighborcommunication between the
differential power converters. Compared to previous solutions, the
proposed algorithm achieves reduced number of perturbations at
each step and potentially faster tracking without adding extra
hardware; all these features make this algorithm well-suited for
long submodule strings. The formulation of the algorithm, discussion of its properties, as well as three case studies are presented.
The performance of the distributed tracking algorithm has been
verified via experiments, which yielded quantifiable improvements
over other techniques that have been implemented in practice.
Both simulations and hardware experiments have confirmed the
effectiveness of the proposed distributed algorithm.