Mitigation of Power Losses in Solar Photovoltaic Systems Under Partial Shading Using Optimization-Based MPPT

Partial shading is one of the crucial bottlenecks in solar photovoltaic (PV) system.The performance of a PV system is affected due to partial shading.This paper highlights the impact of partial shading condition (PSC) on the performance of PV systems with an experimental analysis using a PV emulator.A reduction of 37% in maximum power, 38% in fill factor, and 60% in efficiency as a result of PSC was observed in the experimentation work.PSC also results into multiple peaks on power-voltage (P-V) curve.One of these peaks is the Global Maximum Power Point (GMPP) and other peaks are local MPPs.The GMPP cannot be tracked using conventional MPPT algorithms.This paper proposes a new optimization method called as Firefly Algorithm (FA) built on a metaheuristic approach for Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT).Results obtained through the simulation show the enhancement in the tracking efficiency and tracking time over the conventional MPPT methods by achieving the tracking efficiency of 98.12% with a response time of less than 1ms.The proposed system is also able to reduce the oscillations around MPP and achieve stable performance under dynamically varying environmental conditions.