Novel Hybrid PV Configurations to Enhance the Output Power and Efficiency by Minimising the Number of Peaks and Mismatching Loss

Abstract

The performance of the Photovoltaic (PV) array is greatly hampered by Partial Shading Conditions (PSCs). The output power and efficiency of the PV array degrades substantially under PSC. The main objective of this research paper is to compare, simulate and analyse the performance of conventional hybrid PV configurations, namely Series Parallel-Total Cross Tied (SP-TCT), Bridge Link-Total Cross Tied (BL-TCT), Honey Comb-Total Cross Tied (HC-TCT) and Bridge Link-Honey Comb (BL-HC) with proposed novel hybrid PV configurations, such as Alternate-Total Cross Tied-Series Parallel (A-TCT-SP), Alternate-Total Cross Tied-Bridge link (A-TCT-BL), Alternate-Total Cross Tied-Honey Comb (A-TCT-HC) and Alternate-Bridge Link-Honey Comb (A-BL-HC) under uniform irradiance and various PSC. All the PV configurations are simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK software and a 6 × 6 array of 7200 Wp is considered for investigation. The performance parameters considered for comparison are maximum output power, maximum output voltage, maximum output current, number of peaks, open circuit voltage, short circuit current, fill factor, shading loss, mismatching power loss and efficiency. Eight different shading patterns namely uneven row, uneven column, diagonal, central, long, and wide, random, L-shaped and triangular are considered for simulations. The performance analysis proves that the proposed A-TCT-BL PV configuration outperforms the conventional hybrid PV configuration in terms of enhanced output power and efficiency. It also significantly reduces the number of peaks and minimises mismatching losses under most of the PSC.