The maximum power delivered by a photovoltaic system is greatly influenced by atmospheric conditions such as irradiation and temperature and by surrounding objects like trees, raindrops, tall buildings, animal droppings, and clouds. The partial shading caused by these surrounding objects and the rapidly changing atmospheric parameters make maximum power point tracking (MPPT) challenging. This paper proposes a hybrid MPPT algorithm that combines the benefits of the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) and hill climbing (HC) techniques. As long as the rate of change of irradiance does not exceed a specific limit, the HC mode is applied to track the global maximum power point (GMPP). Once a high rate of change in irradiation is detected, the SSA mode is activated. Moreover, the proposed algorithm employs the concept of boundary conditions to handle fast and slow fluctuating irradiance patterns. A comprehensive comparative evaluation of the proposed hybrid SSA-HC with state-of-the-art MPPT algorithms has been undertaken. Four distinct cases have been examined, including irradiance conditions with varying rates of change and partial shading conditions. The proposed hybrid SSA-HC algorithm has been validated and tested using a developed hardware setup, simulated in MATLAB for solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, and compared with standard SSA and HC. The performance of the tracking capability of this proposed hybrid technique at both steady-state and dynamic conditions under rapid and gradual irradiance changes demonstrates its superiority over recent state-of-the-art algorithms.
