Improved RCC-Based MPPT Strategy for Enhanced Solar Energy Harvesting in Shaded Environments

An improved ripple correlation control (iRCC) algorithm is proposed to enable conventional ripple correlation control (cRCC) to track maximum power under uniform and partial shading condition (PSC). The proposed iRCC has two parts; the first part detects the global maximum power point (GMPP) under PSC, the second part executes the ripple correlation control to operate the photovoltaic (PV) array at GMPP. The proposed iRCC stays with the second part under uniform irradiation condition and moves to the GMPP only when it detects a dynamic change in weather condition. The proposed iRCC is validated through simulation in Matlab and by hardware prototype. The performance improvement is verified in contrast with the conventional RCC method. The results showcase that the proposed iRCC algorithm accurately tracks the GMPP compared to the conventional RCC method. Consequently, the proposed iRCC method, under partial shading condition 1 (PSC-1), produce 131 % more output power compared with the cRCC method. For PSC-2, the shading resulted in power peaks such that the proposed iRCC power yield is almost equal to the cRCC method. This suggests that the proposed iRCC method can outperform the cRCC method depending on the shading pattern.