Architectural analysis of photovoltaic systems subjected to partial shading with a simple DC-DC step-up converter

The output voltage of parallel connected solar cells is very low to drive the load connected across its terminals even though they are efficient in delivering the peak output power even under extreme partial shading conditions. A basic dc-dc boost converter circuit is used in this paper to evaluate the performance of a parallel architecture in comparison with series and series-parallel architectures. SPICE simulations are used to analyze the architectures and identify the best configuration in terms of power conversion efficiency under different partial shading scenarios as well as in normal operation.