Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on
3
Systems and Control, University of Batna 2, Batna,
Algeria, May 7-9, 2017
FPGA implementation of PSO based MPPT for PV systems under
partial shading conditions
Karim KACEDa , Cherif LARBESa , Salah Mohamed AIT-CHIKHa ,
Moussaab BOUNABIa , Zine Elabadine DAHMANEa
Abstract This paper presents a Field Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA) implementation of Particle Swarm Optimisation
(PSO) algorithm for maximum power point tracking (MPPT).
The PSO method is very effective to handle the multimodal
power-voltage (P -V ) curve under partial shading conditions
and presents several advantages such as simple structure and
good dynamic performances. The PSO method has been de-
signed using the very high-speed description language (VHDL)
and implemented on Xilinx Virtex5 (XC5VLX50-1FFG676)
FPGA. The use of FPGA offers a high degree of flexibility and
robustness for the MPPT algorithm. The simulations results
demonstrate the accuracy of PSO for global peak tracking and
its superiority over the Perturb and Observe (P&O) technique.
The developed architecture is tested in real time application
on a buck-boost converter. Experimental results confirm the
efficiency of the proposed scheme and its high accuracy to
handle the partial shading.
Index Terms Field programmable gate array (FPGA), par-
ticle swarm optimisation (PSO), maximum power point tracking
(MPPT), photovoltaic (PV) system, partial shading conditions.
I. I NTRODUCTION
INCE the energy provided by the photovoltaic (PV)
S system depends on the atmospheric conditions like
irradiance and temperature, a stage of adaptation is inserted
between the photovoltaic generator and the load to extract the
maximum of the available power. This stage is a conjunction
of a DC-DC converter and a maximum power point tracker
(MPPT).
At the uniform irradiance conditions, i.e. when the PV
panel receives homogenous irradiance, the PV panel ex-
hibits a single MPP. By contrast, when some part of the
PV panel receives different irradiance than others, then it
is subjected to partial shading. This condition may occur
because of many factors like clouds, birds, trees, buildings
and others [1]. When partial shading occurs, some PV cells
become receiving elements rather than generating current.
This phenomenon is called hot spot and can contribute to
the destruction of these cells. To protect the PV cells, the PV
module are equipped with by pass diodes. The integration
of these diodes has as a result, the modification of the
P -V characteristic curve which becomes multimodal. The
P -V characteristic is characterised then by the appearance
of several maximum power point: several local maximum
power point (LMPP) and one global maximum power point
(GMPP).
a Laboratoire des Dispositifs de Communication et de Conversion Photo-
voltaique, Ecole Nationale Polytechnique, Alger 16200, Algeria
978-1-5090-3960-9/17/$31.00 2017 IEEE
SuBA.
Several digital MPPT techniques have been reported in
literature. These methods are effective under uniform condi-
tions but their performance deteriorates when partial shading
occurs. Indeed, these methods (like P&O and Incremental
Conductance INC) lack the intelligence that will allow them
to distinguish between LMPP and GMPP and can be trapped
into a LMPP when the P -V characteristic is not unimodal.
To solve the case of partial shading, several global MPPT
techniques are developed. [2], [3] proposed two stages MPPT
algorithm. In the first stage, the P -V curve is scanned
and the GMPP is recorded, while in the second stage this
methods used either the P&O algorithm [2] or fuzzy logic
method [3] to maintain the operating point at the GMPP.
Methaheuristic algorithms are gained more attention and are
proposed by many researchers to deal with the multimodal
P -V characteristic under partial shading conditions. Conven-
tional PSO algorithm is proposed in [4], [5]. Improvements
of PSO algorithm are reported in [6], [7] by using adaptive
approaches to adjust PSO algorithm control parameters. [8]
proposed a deterministic PSO algorithm to improuve the
performance of GMPP tracking by omitting the random
numbers from the velocity equation. Others evolutionary and
swarm intelligence algorithms including ant colony optimisa-
tion(ACO) algorithm [9], Cukoo search (CS) algorithm [10]
and differential evolution (DE) algorithm [11] are proposed
for GMPP tracking. Although the published results showed
good tracking performance, the structures of these algorithms
are more complex than the PSO algorithm which makes their
practical implementation more difficult.
The Conventional PSO algorithm presents a lot of ad-
vantages. Its structure is very simple compared by the
other methaheuristic applied for MPPT. Also, the control
parameter selection is much easier. In fact, the conventional
PSO has three control parameters. Despite improvements that
can be achieved with adaptive and modified PSO structure,
it can be noticed that this results can be reached with fine
tuning and optimized parameter selection in the conventional
PSO. The PSO algorithm based MPPT is effective under
partial shading and presents high tracking efficiency and
fast speed convergence towards the GMPP. Previous works
have implemented this technique either in microcontrollers
or digital signal processors (DSPs). Despite performance that
can be provided by this hardware, they cant outperform the
computing performance of field-programmable gate arrays
(FPGA).
Many authors have discussed the implementation of MPPT
techniques on FPGA [12]. The use of FPGA circuit for
150
the implementation of MPPT control algorithms offers many RS I
advantages over others hardware. The FPGA description is +
a real hardware implementation of the MPPT algorithm.
Since all instruction of the tracking system, even if they
D1 D2
are complex, may be integrated into the same FPGA cir-
IPV RP V
cuit, these chips can offer lower cost implementation with
high performance. Being reconfigurable, FPGAs can offer a
high degree of flexibility and robustness. Unlike processors,
FPGAs are truly parallel, so each independent task can be

performed by a dedicated part of these chips. In addition,
the speed and the hardware parallelism of FPGAs allow Fig. 1: Equivalent circuit of a solar cell.
better temporal resolution and improved of the performance
of MPPT control algorithms.
TABLE I: SM55 module specifications.
In this paper, the implementation of the PSO technique
into FPGA is presented.The remainder of the paper is Parameters Value
Maximum power (Pmax ) 55 W
structured as follows. Section II presents the modelling of Short circuit current (Isc ) 3.45 A
the photovoltaic module and the P -V characteristic of the Open circuit voltage(Voc ) 21.7 V
photovoltaic panel under uniform and non uniform condition. Current at Pmax (Impp ) 3.15 A
Voltage at Pmax (Vmpp ) 17.4 V
Section III discusses the application of PSO algorithm for Temperature coefficient of Isc (KI ) 1.2103 A/ C
MPPT. Section IV shows the accuracy of the PSO algorithm Temperature coefficient of Voc (KV ) -77103 V/ C
in the global peak tracking and its superiority over the
P&O algorithms. FPGA implementation and experimental
validation are presented in section V and finally, a conclusion considered as four (4) sub-modules and each sub-module is
is made in section VI. protected by one bypass diode. The presence of these protec-
tion diodes makes the P -V characteristic more complicated
II. P-V CHARACTERISTIC UNDER PARTIAL SHADING when PV panel is subjected to partial shading.
CONDITIONS
Fig. 3 shows the corresponding static P -V curves for two
A. Photovoltaic module model different shading patterns. For the first case, the PV panel is
supposed receiving a uniform solar irradiance, thus, the P -
The general equivalent electrical circuit of the two-diode V curve exhibits a unique maximum power point (MPP). In
model, shown in Fig. 1 is used to simulate the behaviour
of the solar cell. This model contains a current source IP V , the second case, we assume that each sub-module receives
two diodes D1 and D2, a series resistance RS and a parallel
resistance RP . The PV module is associated by a number PV module 1
of PV cells serially connected. Eq. (1) describes the output IPV +
current of the PV module
   
V + IRS NS
I = IP V Io1 exp 1
a1 VT NS

     
V + IRS NS V + IRS NS
Io2 exp 1 (1)
a2 VT NS R P NS

where V and I refer to the PV module output voltage VPV

and the PV module output current, respectively. NS is the
number of solar cells serially connected. VT (equal to kT /q)
is the thermal voltage of the diodes, k is the Boltzmann
constant (1.3806503 1019 J/K), q is the electron charge
(1.60217646 1019 C) and T is the temperature in Kelvin.
a1 and a2 are the ideality factors of the diodes D1 and D2,
respectively. The parameters of the PV module utilised in
this paper (SM55) are reported in TABLE I. It is composed
of 36 cells serially associated and protected by two bypass -
diodes. PV module 2
B. Influence of partial shading
Fig. 2: PV array comprising two photovoltaic modules asso-
Fig. 2 shows a PV panel comprising two photovoltaic ciated in series.
modules associated in series. The resulting panel can be

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 MPP
Gbest denotes the best position reached by the particles of
120
Uniforme irradiance the swarm.
Partial shading The position of the particle is adjusted using
100
xt+1
i = xti + vit+1 (3)

80
B. PSO algorithm based MPPT
Power (W)

The duty cycle of the PWM signal is chosen to be the

60
GMPP
optimization variable. Thus, it is adjusted directly by the
LMPP3
MPPT controller.
LMPP2
40
Firstly, an initial vector of duty cycle with three (3)
particles is defined. The purpose of the optimisation process
LMPP1 is the maximisation of the PV panel power, which is defined
20
to be the objective function. The new duty cycles are then
calculated for each iteration by the equations
0
1 40
30 vit+1 = vit + c1 r1 P besti dti + c2 r2 Gbest dti (4)



10 20
Curve number 2 0 Voltage (V)
Fig. 3: Two P -V curves of photovoltaic panel under uniform dt+1
i = dti + vit+1 (5)
and partiel shading conditions.
The algorithm continues the optimisation process until
constraint on convergence is satisfied. The condition shown
in the Eq. (6) is used as a convergence criterion.
a different irradiance. In this case, the P -V characteristic  t+1
dt+1

is characterized by the appearance of four maximum power d
i j
 d ; i, j = 1, 2, 3 (i 6= j) (6)
point whose the global is P = 52.89 W at V = 27.59 V.
Thus, the P -V characteristic can take various forms accord- Due to varying weather and loading conditions, the global
ing to the shading pattern and the global maximum power MPP is usually varying. The MPPT technique should have
point (GMPP)tracking process becomes a more challenging the capacity to detect the variation of shading pattern and
task. to search for the new global MPP. The search process is
initialised when the condition shown in the Eq. (7) is satisfied
III. MPPT CONTROLLER BASED ON PSO
ALGORITHM |PP V new PP V last |
> P (7)
A. General Overview on PSO algorithm PP V last

Particle swarm optimization is a population-based meta- IV. M ATLAB /S IMULINK S IMULATIONS

heuristic developed by James Kennedy and Russel Eberhart
in 1995 [13]. This algorithm is inspired in general by the In order to assess the effectiveness of the proposed
artificial life and specifically by the social behaviour of technique, a photovoltaic system is simulated on Matlab-
swarming animals, such as the schooling behavior in fishes Simulink. The different blocks constituting the model are
and the flocking of birds. shown in Fig. 4. The photovoltaic panel used comprises four
The swarm of particles corresponds to a group of agents, (4) SM55 photovoltaic modules serially connected.
called particles. Each particle is considered as a solution of
the problem and it is assigned a position and a velocity.
Moreover, each particle has a memory which enables it to
remember its best performance (in position and value) and
the best performance achieved by the neighbouring particles. PV Buck-Boost
Load
The velocity, which describes the step size of movement, array converter
is given by
PWM
vit+1 = vit + c1 r1 P besti xti + c2 r2 Gbest xti (2)



VPV

where is the inertia coefficient; c1 and c2 are two con- IPV PSO-MPPT
stants, called acceleration coefficients; r1 and r2 are two
random numbers drawn uniformly in [0, 1], at each iteration Fig. 4: Schematic diagram of the simulated photovoltaic
t. P besti (t) is the personal best position of particle i and system.

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 The switched-mode DC-DC converter used is a Buck-
Boost converter. The parameters used for PSO algorithm 0.8
are w = 0.4, c1 = 0.5 and c2 = 0.75, d = 0.01
0.6

d
and P = 0.02. TThe sampling time for the current and
voltage acquisition is 0.05 s. The proposed algorithm is
0.4
tested for two different configurations of partial shading. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Fig. 5 shows the various P -V characteristics corresponding
of the configurations. The first P -V curve is characterized 4

Ipv (A)
by the presence of five (5) maximum power points. The
2
global maximum point is located to the right of this curve.
The second configuration presents partial shading with the
0
moving of global maximum power point to the middle of the 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
P -V curve. Each shading configuration lasts 5 seconds.
100
The results of the dynamic tracking are shown in Fig.

Vpv (V)
6. Initially, the PSO method transmitted the first three duty
50
cycles and begins the optimization process. It can be seen
that the proposed technique is able to distinguish between 0
the global maximum (PGM P P = 146.72 W) and the local 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
maxima. At t = 5 s, the configuration of the shading GMPP is successfully located
200
changes. The proposed algorithm detects this change through

Ppv (w)
information on the power of the photovoltaic panel that
100
spents from P = 146.72 W to P = 72.64 W. The
process of the tracking is then re-initialised and the algorithm 0
has successfully locating the new global maximum which 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
corresponds to V = 45.86 V and I = 2.1 A. Time (s)
The performances of the PSO algorithm are evaluated in Fig. 6: Variation of duty cycle, PV current, PV voltage and
comparison with P &O algorithm. The results of the tracking PV power during GMPP tracking using PSO-MPPT.
are shown in Fig. 7. For P &O algorithm, a fixed perturbation
step of dP &O = 0.01 is imposed every 0.05 s. For the first
configuration, the P &O algorithm has successfully located
the GMPP, which is found to the right of the P -V charac- 0.5
teristic. Nevertheless, it is can be noticed that the tracking
d

speed is slow and the oscillations around the GMPP are

large. For the second configurations, the algorithm could not 0
distinguish the GMPP from LMPPs and trapped in an LMPP. 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
These results prove the incapacity of the P &O algorithm to 2
handle the case of partial shading with efficiency.
Ipv (A)

1
150
Shading pattern 1
Shading pattern 2 0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

100
Vpv (V)

100
50
Power (W)

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

200
50 Slow tracking speed LMPP
Ppv (w)

100

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
0
10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90
Time (s)
Voltage (V)
Fig. 7: Variation of duty cycle, PV current, PV voltage and
Fig. 5: P -V curves used in the simulation. PV power during GMPP tracking using P &O algorithm.

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 40
GMPP
Shading pattern 1
LMPP
30

Power (W)
PV panel Buck-Boost 20
Load
(SM55) converter 10

0
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Voltage (V)
PWM
40
GMPP Shading pattern 2
Isolation + driver
30

Power (W)
LMPP2
VPV 20
LV 25-P ADC LMPP1
IPV
LA 55-P ADC 10

0
FPGA-based PSO MPPT 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Voltage (V)

Fig. 8: Schematic of connections in the experimental PV Fig. 9: Measured P -V curve under two partial shading
system with the FPGA-based PSO MPPT controller. patterns.

V. FPGA IMPLEMENTATION the second case, the P -V characteristic has three points
of maximum power. The global maximum power point,
The PSO algorithm is implemented on an FPGA circuit
PGM P P = 33.81 W is in the middle of the P -V curve at
XC5VLX50-1FFG676 of Vertex5 family. This circuit is
VGM P P = 17.25 V.
built around an ML501 development board [14]. The codes
are written in VHDL and are synthesized with ISE 10.1 of
Xilinx. Fig. 10(a) and (b) show the PV output voltage and the
PV output current obtained for the first and the second
shading patterns, respectively. The experimental results are
FPGAs are Very large Scale Integration (VLSI)
recorded for the two tests and the corresponding PV power
components. They are mainly constituted by configurable
logic blocks (CLB), configurable input/output blocs (IOB)
and programmable resources for interconnection.

Fig. 8 shows the experimental system developed for the

validation of the PSO algorithm. The power converter used
is a buck-boost converter with the following parameters:
L = 0.7 mH, C1 = 440 F, C2 = 330 F and a switching
frequency of 50 kHz.

The architecture of the PSO algorithm implemented

on FPGA includes various sub-units coded separately.
This modular programming allows a better optimization (a)
of hardware resource and a more flexible structure. The
different blocs ensure the calculation of the PV power from
the values of PV current and PV voltage, the execution
of the different instruction of the PSO algorithm and the
generation of the PWM signal from the duty cycle d in ordr
to control the power converter.

The implemented architecture is tested experimentally for

two different partial shading patterns. The corresponding
P -V curves are presented in Fig. 9. This curves are obtained
by a scanning procedure, which increases the duty cycle (b)
from 0 to 1 within one second. The first P -V curve is
characterized by the presence of two points of maximum Fig. 10: Tracking PV voltage and PV current for the PSO
power, PLM P P = 29.33 W and PGM P P = 35.6 W. In method under (a) the first and (b) the second shading pattern.

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 40
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V = 16.5 V and I = 2.15 A. Also in the second case,
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VI. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, FPGA implementation for PSO-MPPT
method is proposed. The use of FPGA for the implemen-
tation of the MPPT techniques offers lower cost imple-
mentation with high performance. In addition, FPGAs add
flexibility and robustness for the MPPT controller since
they are very speed and truly parallel. The performances
of the PSO algorithm are verified under extreme partial
shading configurations and the proposed modular architec-
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Virtex5 (XC5VLX50-1FFG676) FPGA. Experimental results
highlight the interest of using the FPGAs chip for the design
of the MPPT controller and prouve the high accuracy of the
proposed scheme to handle the partial shading.
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