Abstract
This work presents a new trapezoidal-rule-based variation of the perturb and observe algorithm to track the point with maximum power for a wind energy conversion system. The algorithm works in three steps. In the first step, the trapezoidal-rule-based division of the power curve into trapezoids of equal width is carried out. In the second step, areas of the adjacent trapezoids are compared to identify the trapezoid with the largest area. In the third step, the conventional perturb and observe algorithm is employed in the trapezoid having the largest area to capture the point of maximum power. The algorithm is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK to check the efficacy in capturing the maximum power. The simulation results suggest that the proposed method performs well under fluctuating wind conditions with improved yielded power. An effort to achieve simplicity for implementation and effectively track the maximum power point is made and presented.