Design of an arduino based Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) solar charge controller

Abstract

Renewable sources such as the Photovoltaic Systems (PV) have been used over decades in order to focus on greener sources of power generation. Today it has become a matter of concern on how to reduce COST and improve EFFICIENCY in order to harness and use these natural resources in a much better way possible. Hence the idea of Maximum Power Point Tracking System (MPPT) has emerged, which is basically a system used by charge controllers for wind turbines and Photovoltaic Systems to employ and also provide a maximized power output. This Thesis is mainly concerned with the utilization of such a system in order to achieve a controlled photovoltaic power using MPPT mechanism. The main aim of this project was to track the maximum power point of the photovoltaic module so that the maximum possible power can be extracted from the photovoltaic systems by varying certain conditions in algorithm and set up mechanism. Finally the output data from this project was compared with the other MPPT algorithms in order to attain an improved performance hence a better MPPT system. Furthermore, the system was interfaced with GSM to get a better access of data from anywhere for analysis thus reducing the physical work of data collection.