ASSESSING THE IMPACTS OF PARTIAL SHADING ON SOLAR PHOTOVOLTAIC CONFIGURATIONS

Abstract

Partial shading is a commonly phenomenon which has changed the performance of PV systems such as passing cloud, trees, building…and under complex operation conditions. The objective of this paper is to compare the performance of different connection configurations of PV cells: series connection (SC), parallel connection (PC) and series – parallel connection (SPC) under the influence of partial shade. The proposed configurations comprise six PV modul which includes 72 PV cells with 200W is used to simulate using PSIM software. The study concentrates on output characteristics of PV array under shading condition: varying location of shaded and different levels of shadow. The simulation results are introduced showed the different influence on different configurations in the same of operation condition. It is correctly explained that the parallel configuration always achieves the highest output power with the least number of maximum power point (MPP) peaks. Although the output voltage of this configuration is not high, which may make it difficult to design DC-DC converters, it shows the most stability. This can be widely applied in selecting the type of link configuration to suit the requirements set out in future studies to achieve the greatest effect.