Automated Control System for Photovoltaic Panel

The paper presents an automatic control system to achieve maximum energy efficiency from a solar panel. The proposed implementation integrates the power part and the orientation part into a single control module. The orientation part uses a mechanism with stepper motors to allow the solar panel to be positioned in the direction of the incident radiation. The power part consists of a synchronous buck converter, controlled in a closed loop, connected to a 12 V battery. A constant current - constant voltage charging cycle will be implemented, and an algorithm for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) will also be integrated into this process. To evaluate the performance of the converter, the SIMULINK program was used for testing the digital proportional-integral (PI) control, measuring the characteristic parameters, comparing the perturb and observe (P&O) and incremental conductance (IC) algorithms, and testing the charging cycle.