LAUSR

Abstract This paper presents two MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) techniques, the incremental conductance (IC) and the sliding mode control (SMC), applied to an autonomous photovoltaic system, under varying solar irradiance. The whole system is simulated in Matlab/Simulink environment. Simulation results show that the IC technique provides good efficiency under rapidly changing climatic conditions, but the accuracy for finding the MPP is quite low. Whereas, the SMC technique provides good performance under the climatic changes in term of stability and robustness to solar irradiance variation. Through simulations, SMC can accurately track the MPP of the PV module and then improve the PV system efficiency, better than IC technique can.