A Novel Hybrid Slime Mould MPPT Technique for BL-HC Configured Solar PV System Under PSCs

Solar photovoltaic (SPV) systems are becoming key emerging technologies for both stand-alone and grid-connected power system applications. However, uncertainty in environmental conditions such as temperature and irradiation dominates the performance of the SPV system. Due to uncertainty in environmental conditions, there should be drastic reduction in output power, efficiency and higher mismatch power loss in the SPV system. This adverse phenomenon can be overawed by the inclusion of bypass diode. But the inclusion will result in multiple peaks that are developed in the P–V curve. This will necessitate a robust MPPT controller to track the global maximum power (GMP) under PSCs. Various conventional (P&O, InC etc.) and optimization algorithms are described in the literature, but they are unsuccessful to identify GMP among multiple peaks. This paper proposes a novel hybrid slime mould assisted with perturb and observe (P&O) MPPT approach (HSMO) with hybrid bridge link-honey comb (BL-HC) configured PV system to enhance the better maximum power under PSCs. The proposed work is carried out in MATLAB/Simulink environment. Also, the performance of proposed HSMO technique is compared with the latest adaptive coefficient PSO (ACPSO), Flower Pollination algorithm (FPA), and slime mould optimization (SMO) MPPT techniques in terms of tracked GMP, tracking efficiency, and convergence time/tracking speed. The results of the proposed HSMO technique also demonstrate its supremacy in terms of tracked GMP, convergence time, and efficiency.