A solar photovoltaic (PV) system has been emerging out as one of the greatest potential renewable energy sources and is contributing significantly in the energy sector. The PV system depends upon the solar irradiation and any changes in the incoming solar irradiation will affect badly on the output of the PV system. The solar irradiation is location specific and also the atmospheric conditions in the surroundings of the PV system contribute significantly to its performance. This paper presents the cumulative assessment of the four MPPT techniques during the partial shading conditions (PSCs) for different configurations of the PV array. The partial shading configurations like series-parallel, bridge link, total cross tied and honeycomb structure for an 8×4 PV array has been simulated to compare the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques. The MPPT techniques like perturb and observe, incremental conductance, extremum seeking control and a fuzzy logic controller were implemented for different shading patterns. The results related to the maximum power tracked, tracking efficiency of each of the MPPT techniques were presented in order to assess the best MPPT technique and the best configuration of the PV array for yielding the maximum power during the PSCs.

Solar energy is widely available in nature and electricity can be easily extracted using solar PV cells. A fuel cell being reliable and environment friendly becomes a good choice for the backup so as to compensate for continuously varying solar irradiation. This paper presents simple control schemes for power management of the DC microgrid consisting of PV modules and fuel cell as energy sources and a hydrogen electrolyzer system for storing the excess power generated. The supercapacitor bank is used as a short term energy storage device for providing the energy buffer whenever sudden fluctuations occur in the input power and the load demand. A new power control strategy is developed for a hydrogen storage system. The performance of the system is assessed with and without the supercapacitor bank and the results are compared. A comparative study of the voltage regulation of the microgrid is presented with the controller of the supercapacitor bank, realized using a traditional PI controller and an intelligent fuzzy logic controller.

One of the most critical systems of any satellite is the Electrical Power System (EPS) and without any available energy, the satellite would simply stop to function. Therefore, the presented research within this paper investigates the areas relating to the satellite EPS with the main focus towards the CubeSat platform. In this paper, an appropriate EPS architecture with the suitable control policy for CubeSat missions is proposed. The suggested control strategy combines two methods, the Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) and the Battery Charge Regulation (BCR), in one power converter circuit, in order to extract the maximum power of the Photovoltaic (PV) system and regulate the battery voltage from overcharging. This proposed combined control technique is using a Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC) strategy serving two main purposes, the MPPT and BCR. Without an additional battery charger circuit and without switching technique between the two controllers, there are no switching losses and the efficiency of the charging characteristic can be increased by selecting this proposed combined FLC. By testing a space-based PV model with the proposed EPS architecture, some simulation results are compared to demonstrate the superiority of the proposed control strategy over the conventional strategies such as Perturb and Observe (P&O) and FLC with a Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) controller.