Abstract

A photovoltaic generator present nonlinearvoltage-current characteristics. A boost converter is used tomatch the photovoltaic system to the load charge and to operatethe photovoltaic cell array at maximum power point. This paperpresents an application of a neural network to identify theoptimal operating point of the photovoltaic module. The poweroutput from the modules depends on the environmental factorssuch as cell temperature and solar irradiation. Therefore,accurate identification of optimal operating point andcontinuous control of boost converter are required to achieve themaximum output efficiency. The proposed neural network has asimple structure and provides an accurate identification of theoptimal operating point and also an accurate estimation of themaximum power from the photovoltaic modules. The proposedmodel is compared with conventional Perturb and Observetechnique and shown that Artificial Neural Network canincrease the overall system efficiency by approximately 10%.