A Unified Approach For Mitigation of PV Output Power Losses During Partial Shading Conditions

Abstract

Energy demand forecasted for the next several years has been bench-marked due to the massive need for electrical energy. Solar power plants have earned a great marketplace in the following years, but it also faces challenges in terms of power dissipation due to the frequent occurrence of shade. As a result, per unit of solar electricity price increases drastically. There is an immense need to ensure a maximum dependable power conversion efficiency of Photovoltaic (PV) systems by mitigating power output losses during partial shading conditions. Reconfiguration of PV arrays is a useful, effective, and promising approach in this context. Though several reconfiguration techniques have been developed in recent years, their applicability to real-time power plants is debatable due to the requirement of a large number of physical relocations, long interconnecting ties, and complexity. A novel row index mathematical procedure is proposed followed by a technique in which the reconfiguration matrix indexes are filled with a unique number so that no row number repeats in the same row and column. To propose a new topology, comparative analysis has been done on the very recent techniques such as Sudoku, TCT, Chess-Knight, and PSO-based reconfiguration on five different shading patterns. It has been observed that approximately 68 % power loss is mitigated in TCT configuration. It is worth noting that it results in higher PV output power than existing latest reconfiguration techniques such as PSO, chess knight, Sudoku, and others