Day to day increasing energy demand, depletion of conventional energy sources and harmful effect of global warming open a vent to search alternative energy sources like solar, wind, biomass etc. Now a day, solar energy is one of the prime renewable energy sources because of availability around the globe. The nonlinear I–V characteristic of a solar photovoltaic (SPV) cell reduces the efficiency of the overall SPV system during variable solar irradiance and continuous changing temperature. Hence, to maximize the efficiency of the overall SPV system an efficient power conversion technique is compulsory. To maximize the overall efficiency, a dc–dc converter is normally used which is controlled by a maximum power point tracking (MPPT) controller. Here a comparative analysis between different buck-boost converter (conventional buck-boost converter, Cúk, Zeta, and Sepic) is presented for solar photovoltaic application. All the analysis is done in Matlab /Simulink environment and compares the results at the constant temperature condition at variable irradiance and different load are presented here.

Keywords: Photovoltaic energy conversion, Buck-boost dc-dc converters, Incremental conductance (IC), Maximum power point tracking (MPPT)