Maximizing Output Power of a PV Array Under Non-uniform Solar Irradiation Conditions

Modules of PV array receive different level of solar irradiance under partial shading conditions causing lower power generation resulting in poor efficiency. An effective approach to improve this efficiency is to rearrange the physical location of the module in a manner so that uniform shading on all modules can be achieved. In this paper, a generalized physical relocation of modules with a fixed electrical connection in a TCT configuration is presented which is valid for square as well as rectangular PV array. The proposed configuration disperse the shadow effectively over the entire array. The performance of the proposed configuration in term of power generation and mismatch loss is compared with the other configurations under different shading patterns. From the simulation results, it is found that the power generated by the proposed configuration is higher and mismatch loss is less as compared to other configurations. Hence, the proposed configuration is more effective under any kind of shading conditions.