Solar Energy

Dear readers...Global increase in pollution around the world has triggered a massive debate on reducing the amount of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases released in the atmosphere as a result of industrialization. Most of the need of energy in industries and the growing population is met by burning fossil fuel in power plants. So, governments around the world are spending heavily on research pertaining ways to produce electrical energy by ways of sources which are not harmless but also abundant in nature. Non-conventional energy sources like wind and solar are being looked upon as potential player in the future energy market.Specially the solar energy is abundantly available throughout the world and can be utilized in two forms.One being utilizing the heat content of solar energy and other way is to convert solar energy directly into electrical energy which is done by photovoltaic panel(PV).

The proper extraction or we can say maximum extraction of the output from the PV panel is the main challenge for the scientist now-a-days.Many techniques have been developed such as constant voltage method, Perturb & Observe method, etc. and many are being developed.The output of the PV panel depends on various factors such as solar insolation, temperature, shading on PV panels etc. All these factors has to be incorporated in developing the maximum power point tracker (MPPT) to extract the maximum electrical power output from the PV panel.

Fig 1: Solar PV panel

The tracking of the solar panel is broadly in two ways. One being mechanical in which the solar panel is rotated according to the movement of sun which varies from morning to evening and according to season. The other method which is to track the maximum power point of tHe P-V curve of the solar panel as shown in figure 2.This helps in reducing the cost of electrical power generated.

Fig 2: PV curve of solar pane