A Comprehensive Shade Resilient Approach for Enhanced PV Array Performance Under Irradiance Mismatch Conditions

This article proposes a comprehensive shade-resilient approach to enhance the overall productivity of the two most widely used photovoltaic (PV) configurations: total-cross-tied (TCT) and series-parallel (SP), under irradiance mismatch conditions (IMCs). The proposed generalized panel rearrangement strategy (GPRS) for TCT and SP-GPRS for SP arrays is applicable to arrays of any dimensions, including PV arrays with odd, even, and mixed numbers of rows and columns. An extensive performance evaluation is conducted, comparing the proposed approach with various contemporary reconfiguration methods, using both simulation and hardware setups. In the simulation analysis, a 9 × 9 PV array is exposed to four unique shading cases. Comparative performance assessment, utilizing prominent performance indices, demonstrates that the proposed GPRS reduces mismatch loss (ML) by up to 75.4% compared to a TCT PV array of comparable dimensions. Additionally, SP-GPRS yields up to 35.6% lower ML than the SP arrangement. Efficiency enhancements of up to 15.18% and 10.03% are achieved by optimizing the module positions in a 9 × 9 PV array within the TCT and SP frameworks using the proposed GPRS and SP-GPRS, respectively. Experimental implementation of the proposed approach reveals significant power augmentation, with improvements of up to 31% and 16.1% for TCT and SP arrangements, respectively.