A Harmony Search Switching Matrix Algorithm for Enhanced Performance of Solar PV Arrays During Non-Uniform Irradiance Scenarios

Abstract

The power loss in the arrays due to non-uniform irradiances in the site is the most common scenario observed in a PV system. The irradiance non-uniformity occurs due to obstacles between actual irradiance and modules caused by dust and shadow of clouds, trees, and buildings in some portions of the array. This results in complications like mismatch, power reduction, deformed characteristics curves, failure of power tracking algorithms, and sometimes physical damage to the PV modules. Numerous solutions are present for mitigating the above complications among which the array reconfiguration gained a huge audience for ease of implementation, lower cost, and higher reliability but, each technique exhibits certain drawbacks. In this paper, a harmony search reconfiguration (HSR) algorithm for dynamic reconfiguration is proposed that has advantages in terms of simplicity, adaptability, convergence speed, reduced switch count, and arbitrary array application. The modeling and validation are done in the MATLAB platform using $5 \times 5$ , $9 \times 9$ , $9 \times 5$ , and $3 \times 3$ arrays under various shading cases and compared with the 22 existing conventional, static, and dynamic techniques. The depth investigation shows the higher performance of the HSR with 24.64% and 12.28% higher performance than conventional and static techniques with lowest actual power deviation of −1.10% and equivalent performance to that of existing techniques with reduced complexities.

Keywords

• Hotspot
• mismatch
• partial shading
• photovoltaic
• power generation
• reconfiguration