Abstract

The conventional maximum power point tracking technique based on Perturb and Observe  remains widely used because of its ease of implementation. However, it often suffers from sustained power oscillation and poor tracking accuracy under rapidly varying irradiance conditions. This paper proposes an Optimized Adaptive Perturb and Observe system that addresses these limitations by integrating a slope-dependent variable step size method with dead-band control. During environmental transients, the adaptive variable step size responds to the power-voltage curve gradient to accelerate maximum power point tracking, whereas in the quiescent phase, the dead-band threshold stabilizes the duty cycle under small power variations, thereby suppressing undesirable oscillations. Hardware-in-the-loop validation using a boost converter shows that the proposed system reduces stabilization time from 115 ms to 60 ms, nearly eliminates the 6.5 W steady-state ripple, increases total power yield by 12.2%, and remains suitable for commercial-scale photovoltaic systems due to its low computational demand.