A Noval One Time Diagonal Sudoku PV Reconfiguration Technique To Soothen The Effect Of Partial Shading Conditions

Photovoltaic (PV) arrays are subject to partial shading and mismatch losses that reduce their power output and efficiency. The main factors for the occurrence of partial shading are flying birds, trees and passing clouds etc. To mitigate these effects, various reconfiguration techniques have been proposed to rearrange the electrical connections of PV modules or submodules. In this paper, we present a novel reconfiguration technique based on the SuDoKu puzzle, which can achieve optimal or near-optimal power output for any shading pattern. We first formulate the PV array reconfiguration problem as a SuDoKu and optimal Sudoku puzzle where each cell represents a PV submodule and each row, column, and block represents a series or parallel connection in former, while the latter guarantees the optimal solution by exhaustively searching all possible permutations. Then Diagonal-SuDoKu is proposed which provides a suboptimal but faster solution by exploiting the diagonal symmetry of the puzzle. We compare the performance of our proposed techniques with existing reconfiguration methods on various shading scenarios with Global maximum power point (GMPP), Mismatch power loss (MPL), Fill-Factor (FF) and Efficiency $({\eta })$ indices and show that they can significantly improve the power output and efficiency of PV arrays.