A reliable GTR-PLC approach for power enhancement and online monitoring of solar PV arrays during partial shading

The PV system encounters severe power loss due to the existence of unavoidable partial shading that is mainly overcome by reconfiguration techniques. Besides the advantage of power enhancement, reconfiguration techniques deal with drawbacks such as limited to symmetrical arrays, higher switches and sensors requirements, lower convergence to optimal solution, and improper monitoring. In this paper, a gorilla troop reconfigurationpower line communication (GTR -PLC) approach is proposed for performance enhancement and monitoring of PV arrays during partial shading. The proposed approach uses a considerably lower switch count along with a lowcost simple architecture for loss reduction and smooth operation of the PV array during partial shading. The proposed approach is validated for 5 x 5 and 9 x 9 arrays under time -domain dynamic shading scenarios in simulation whereas real-time hardware setup -based analysis is conducted for 2 x 3 and 12 x 4 arrays using numerous artificial shading cases. The performance of the proposed system is compared with twelve existing static and dynamic techniques and found to have zero misleading power loss with an average power increment of 38.37 %. Also, a power extraction efficiency of 98.99 % and an average calculation time of 0.09 s in the proposed