Quadrant swapping technique for partial shaded solar photovoltaic system

Abstract

Abstract Solar energy is one among the most essential renewable sources, and its use is vital to the long-term progress in environmental and energy development. Partial shadowing issues are frequently encountered for solar photovoltaic (PV) systems, and they always influence the PV array’s output power production. There are numerous methods used to reconfigure the PV arrays to extract the possible maximum power. However, those methods have sub-optimal performance in addressing certain possible PV array configurations [series-parallel (SP), total-cross-tie (TCT), SP-TCT, and honeycomb (HC)-TCT]. This method involves the investigation of a 4 × 4 matrix and the incorporation of a switching matrix in the proposed quadrant swapping reconfiguration algorithm. Ten different shading conditions are taken into consideration randomly to confirm the efficacy of this work. A PV array (4 × 4) experimental setup with partial shading yielded an enhanced output power in all the cases. The proposed quadrant swapping method yields the highest output power of 136 W. For three cases, the mismatch and power loss are zero. The proposed quadrant swapping technique improves the output power, and fill factor and reduces the power loss and mismatch loss for all partial shading scenarios. The proposed technique can be applied to large PV systems to enhance their performance. However, they remain profitable on an economic level, as demonstrated by the techno-economic analysis.