Power losses mitigation through electrical reconfiguration in partial shading prone solar PV arrays

The susceptibility of solar photovoltaic (PV) modules towards partial shading is one of the major demerits encountered by PV arrays installed in the field. The partial shading among the modules leads to a serious reduction in the array power generation as it introduces several losses due to mismatch among modules. These power losses are mainly countered by implementing various electrical interconnecting configurations such as bridge-linked (BL), honeycomb (HC), and total cross-tied (TCT) rather than using the conventional series-parallel (SP) connection. However, the configurations fail to generate maximum power during all partial shading scenarios. Hence, in this paper, a new module electrical reconfiguration technique is proposed to disperse the effect of partial shading power generation improvement and reduce the losses in the PV arrays. The technique is a one-time fixed electrical reconnection strategy for modules based on the algorithm proposed and requires no sensors and switches. The efficacy of the proposed electrical reconfiguration is investigated for two array sizes in MATLAB/Simulink and a real-time experimental environment whereas, the algorithm is programmed in the Python language. Also, a comparison is done with the conventional electrical configurations under various shading scenarios using the characteristics curves analysis, power generation, losses, efficiencies and performance ratio. The proposed reconfiguration enhances the power output of 26.92% than SP, 24.07% than BL, 25.17% than HC, and 22.96% than TCT during shading.