Shade dispersion-based photovoltaic array configurations for performance enhancement under partial shading conditions

Recently, the partial shading conditions (PSCs) and its impact on the performance of photovoltaic (PV) systems have motivated to explore novel approach to minimize the PSC adverse effect. In this context, the existing PV arrays are reconfigured to overcome the effects of PSCs. This paper presents a comprehensive and comparative study of existed total cross-tied (TCT) configuration with a novel Latin square puzzle-based TCT configuration called Latin square-TCT (LS-TCT) to minimize the shading effects. An investigation is carried out based on the considered partial shading patterns (progressive bottom to top, left to right, diagonal, multistory building, and zigzag shading cases) in global maximum power point (GMPP), power loss, and fill factor. The performance of LS-TCT configuration is compared with benchmark TCT configuration. It is noticed that the proposed LS-TCT configuration has maximum power of 2279W as compared with 1976W for TCT configuration at global maximum power point for a shading case. Further, it is also shown that the minimum power losses in proposed LS-TCT configuration are reduced to 330W as compared with 633W for TCT configuration. Moreover, the fill factor in the proposed LS-TCT configuration is 9.91 as compared with 8.59 for TCT configuration under the considered PSCs. Overall, the performance of LS-TCT configuration is found to be superior as compared with TCT configuration.