Augmenting Power Efficiency by Virtue of a Novel Physical Reconfiguration of Solar Photovoltaic Array in Tandem with Experimental Validation

Abstract

The growing interest in solar energy has led to large photovoltaic (PV) energy parks in today's world. Though the commonly used total‐cross‐tied (TCT) interconnection scheme reduces mismatch losses (MLs), the occurrence of partial shading on massive PV arrays (PVAs) reduces the output power. It invokes numerous local maximum power points (LMPPs) on the power–voltage (P–V) profiles. To counteract the undesired LMPPs, reconfiguration of PVAs is done either through electrical or physical reconfiguration methods. In this respect, physical relocation scheme is more economical for better distribution of partial shade. A novel greater‐than‐SuDoKu (GTS) topology is presented in this paper for achieving physical rearrangement of PV modules amalgamated with TCT interconnection scheme. For analysis, five shading cases are considered and obtained results are compared with conventional TCT and 10 newly established methods. In general, the proposed GTS strategy has shown its eminence in receiving a smoother P–V characteristic, enhanced efficiency, better fill factor, and reduced MLs, which ranges up to 1343 W. Moving forward, herein, the efficacy of the proposed reconfiguration scheme is validated, under the influence of partial shading conditions, through an experimental lab prototype for a 3 × 3 PVA.