Performance improvement of partial shaded solar PV system using Unbalanced Adaptive Dynamic Reconfiguration technique

Partial shading is one of the factors that reduces the output power of the photovoltaic (PV) array. Reduction in output power depends on the shading pattern, the shaded area, and the positioning of the modules within the PV array. This work proposes a novel unbalanced adaptive dynamic reconfiguration (UDAR) method to address these limitations and to enhance power generation. The traditional electric array reconfiguration (EAR) method possesses a uniform size of rows in both adaptive and fixed parts, rendering it incapable of mitigating shading effects within a single row. The proposed UDAR method contains unbalanced rows in each part, which effectively mitigates the effects of shading. The proposed UDAR method is modeled and analyzed under twelve possible real-time shading scenarios with sixteen number of 10 W polycrystalline PV modules. In these shading situations, the suggested UDAR method's performance improvement is assessed and compared with the traditional Series-Parallel (SP), Total Cross Tied (TCT), and EAR approaches. The proposed UDAR method can improve up to 61 % of power than the TCT and EAR methods where the maximum output power increases by 53 %, 39 %, 19 %, and 34 % in different shading patterns.