Comprehensive investigation of PV arrays with puzzle shade dispersion for improved performance

This paper is an attempt to investigate the performance of existing and some proposed solar photovoltaic (PV) array configurations comprehensively. Based on the MATLAB/Simulink model of single diode solar cell, performance of PV array configurations such as series-parallel (SP), total-cross-tied (TCT), bridge-link (BL), honey-comb (HC) and proposed hybrid SP TCT, BL TCT and non-symmetrical puzzle pattern based configurations such as NS-1 (non-symmetrical-1) and NS-2 (non-symmetrical-2) is comprehensively reported. The performance of all these configurations has been investigated using P-V characteristics, power loss due to shading, fill factor and shading dispersion effect on maximum power point (MPP) for various shading patterns namely pattern-1 (vertical shading), pattern-2 (horizontal shading) and pattern-3 (diagonal shading). Extensive simulations are carried out on these configurations for these shading patterns by considering several cases of shading. The performances of proposed configurations are found superior for some cases of shading patterns. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.