Power is the product of voltage and current, P = I * V, and this is what we care about. If you close the nozzle a bit, less water comes out, but it flies further. If you leave it wide open, you get maximum flow, but it spills on your feet. Think of a nozzle at the end of a hose - the more flow of water you let out of it, the less pressure is produced at the exit. As the current drawn increases, the voltage it can produce decreases. ![]() Between these extremes, the voltage that a solar cell can produce depends on how much current it’s producing. Solar cell specs usually quote an open-circuit voltage and a short-circuit current. In this article we’ll take a look at what these MPPT algorithms are, and when you would want to pick a particular one. The tracking of this maximum power point is what is generally referred to as ‘ MPPT‘, but within this one acronym many different algorithms are covered, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. ![]() This is a property that’s important not only with photovoltaics, but also with wind turbines and other highly variable power sources. The keywords here are ‘maximum power point’ (MPP), which refers to the optimal point on the solar panel’s I-V curve. To a certain extent this assumption is correct, but feeding a solar panel’s output into something like a regular old PWM buck or boost regulator is unlikely to get you anywhere close to the panel’s full specifications. When looking at integrating a photovoltaic solar panel into a project, the naive assumption would be that you simply point the panel into the general direction of where the Sun is, and out comes gobs of clean DC power, ready to be used for charging a battery.
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