Performance Evaluation & Simulation of Solar Power System

Abstract: Major challenges faced in implementing solar photovoltaic electric power generation are high initial cost, low conversion efficiency of solar modules & unpredictability of solar insolation fluctuations. Before erecting a PV plant of any capacity in any location, it is best to evaluate the performance of the plant for over a period of time well before the plant is actually installed. This can be accomplished with help of computer simulation. In this work, the performance of a 1.155kW solar pv roof top plant has been evaluated by creating a simulation model using MATLAB- SIMULINK. Simulation model is evaluated for different days’ insolation values without MPPT & with buck-boost converter & cuk converter, with distributed MPPT. Shadow analysis has been performed on the same module & its performance for different shading conditions. Simulation outputs for different days’ data were compared with the practical outputs of the plant & were found to match accurately.

Keywords: Solar Photovoltaics, Photovoltaic (PV), Solar Insolation, Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT), Voltage Ripple