Fast reconfiguration algorithm for improving the efficiency of PV systems

Photovoltaic power systems lose significant amount of energy due to partial shading which occurs when a part of a PV system is shaded while the rest is fully illuminated. These losses appear in the form of mismatch power losses. Minimizing these losses is fortunately possible through reconfiguring the connections of PV modules in a PV system, as reported recently in the literature. However, the available reconfiguration methods are based on biological optimization which needs long computational time to search for the optimal configuration. Unfortunately, this hinders their practical implementation in large PV systems. A reconfiguration technique that finds the optimal configuration in a reduced computational time is proposed in this paper. Simple rules are developed that can determine the best PV configuration without the need to solve heavy optimization problems. The validity and superiority of the proposed method is verified by comparing its performance to the existing methods under various shading scenarios.