Improved MPPT algorithms for rapidly changing environmental conditions

The first part of this paper intends to give an overview of the Maximum Power Point Tracking methods for Photovoltaic (PV) inverters presently reported in the literature. The most well-known and popular methods, like the Perturb and Observe (P&O), the Incremental Conductance (INC) and the Constant Voltage (CV), are presented. These methods, especially the P&O, have been treated by many works, which aim to overcome their shortcomings, either by optimizing the methods, or by combining them. In the second part of the paper an improvement for the P&O and INC method is proposed, which prevents these algorithms to get confused during rapidly changing irradiation conditions, and it considerably increases the efficiency of the MPPT.