Renewable energy sources are becoming important for the production of electricity used in residential, commercial and industrial applications. These resources include nonconventional sources like solar, wind, hydro, biogas, tidal and biomass. All these are contributing in the production of electrical energy and also help in reducing the pollution by reducing the green gas emissions which were one of the reasons to reduce the use of conventional sources. Out of all of the above, the source which

more »

... is gaining an importance and maximum usage is a solar energy. The reason behind its extensive use is it is freely available, abundant, non-pollutingin nature and its conversion without involving any rotating device. Combining the two systems increases the performance and efficiency of a particular system. Hence to improve its performance and use by two-fold, a solar system can be integrated with thermal, hydro or wind power system. Also, a suitable converter topology will be used along with an appropriate control algorithm. Solar energy changes as per irradiance and temperature in a day also one factor which reduces the power output is the partial shedding in cells. This will alleviate the conversion efficiency of solar system (About 20%). Many conventional and advanced algorithms are used for getting the optimum output from a solar system. Now days to get optimum energy from a solar system, soft computing algorithms are used in a system which are called as operating point tracking algorithms. This paper intended to emphasize on converter topologies and a brief introduction of MPPT algorithms