Alternate panel interchange technique to improve the power production of PV array operating under various shading situations

This work presents an improved shade dispersion technique named as Alternate Panel Interchange (API) technique to get an enhanced power output of the PV system under partial shading scenarios. In this proposed technique, Total Cross Tied forms the electrical connections, whereas the physical position of the module is as per the API technique. The proposed technique distributes the effects of mismatching simplified with two stepped dispersion procedures. This paper considers a 6 x 6 array for various shading scenarios. For comparative investigation of the proposed technique with hybrid configurations, Bridge Link-Total Cross Tied, Series Parallel-Total Cross Tied, Honey Comb-Total Cross Tied, and conventional Total Cross Tied are taken. The instantaneous maximum power of the proposed technique improves over TCT by 19.58%, 9.52%, 7.92%, and 1.36% in uneven rows, corner, L-shaped, and triangular shading scenarios. The reduction in mismatch losses is a substantial cause for improved power output with the proposed technique and eventually results in the fill-factor enhancement.