An Efficient Solar Energy Harvesting Technique

Abstract

From last few decades, Renewable energy sources are providing core role to fulfil energy demands. The need of producing energy in electrical form from everlasting energy sources arise due to fossils fuel’s reduction (coal, petroleum, natural gas etc.). Approximately 17% demand of the world’s energy is fulfilled through these everlasting sources. Energy through solar is considered the main source of energy among others renewable energy sources because of its pollution and noise free nature. Energy through solar is widely used to produce electricity by using photovoltaic cells. The inconsistent irradiance, temperature, and unexpected behaviour of weather effects the output of photovoltaic systems, classified as partial or complex partial shading conditions. Under these circumstances, obtaining the maximum output power from the PV system becomes strenuous. This thesis proposes a population-based optimization model, Harris Hawk’s Optimization (HHO) based on the natural inspiration to harvest maximum power under partial or complex partial shading conditions. It is an intelligent strategy, inspired by the surprise pounce chasing style of Harris Hawk. The proposed technique outperforms under different weather conditions, have less computational time, fast convergence speed, and zero oscillations after reaching a power point’s maximum limit. Performance comparison of HHO is made with conventional techniques such as, perturbs and observe (PandO), Incremental conductance (Inc), Bio-inspired particle swarm optimization (PSO), Adaptive cuckoo search optimization (ACS), Hybrid and Dragonfly (DA) algorithm. HHO achieves 99.4% efficiency on average and performs very well among rest of the competing techniques. Under HHO the oscillation is compact to < 1W & the re-tracking is tremendously effective. The results indicate in Table 4.3 shows the HHO algorithm outperforms other algorithms, with reference to fast tracking, convergence time, settling time, efficiency as well as stability under different weather conditions and can attain maximum power point with negligible oscillations, under partial and complex shading.