Global optimum operating point tracker of PV system, under partial shading, using parallel searching

Photovoltaic (PV) panels, sources of renewable energy, are widely integrated into smart grids. the main challenge of photovoltaic systems is the phenomenon of partial shading. In partial shading, more than one optimum point can be found in the P-V curve of a PV array. Tracking the global optimum becomes difficult, because almost methods converge to the first optimum which is not necessary the global one. In this paper, a global optimum operating point tracker is given, by dividing the searching space into more than one and compare between the maximum power of each one. The famous Perturb and Observe (PO) and Incremental conductance (IC) are used to find the optimum of each area searching, and simulation results are given.