A Comparative Study of Ladder Differential Power Processor and Bypass Diode under Partial Shading Conditions

This paper provides a comprehensive comparative analysis of the operation of the DPP and the bypass diodes, specifically focusing on scenarios where one or multiple substrings of a photovoltaic module are shaded. Our investigation involves a PV array consisting of 12 modules experiencing shading due to a variable chimney obstruction, impacting each module differently throughout the day. We perform numerical simulations, incorporating real data for solar irradiance and temperature obtained from measurements at the SolarTech
^Lab
. The results of the proposed DPP approach are compared with those obtained using a traditional bypass diode. The results show that using DPP improves the PV array’s efficiency from 16% to 50%. However, this efficiency could be affected by the shade location on the PV module due to the accumulated diverter current.