Determination of Module Rearrangement Techniques for Non-uniformly Aged PV Arrays with SP, TCT, BL and HC Configurations for Maximum Power Output

Abstract

The power production of a PV array decreases due to some specific factors such as temperature, shading, soiling, non-uniform aging of PV modules etc. The nonuniform aging of PV modules in an array is a significant factor of power degradation. This increases current-voltage (1- V) mismatch among the array modules and causes power loss. There are different techniques of module rearrangements in an array to reduce mismatch power loss (MML) and thus increase the array output power. This paper investigates experimentally both the voltage based and current based module rearrangement techniques on a 4× 6 aged PV array with series-parallel (SP), total-cross-tied (TCT), bridge-linked (BL) and honey-comb (HC) configurations. The results are compared with the conventional technique of randomly module arrangement in an array. The experimental results show that both current and voltage based module rearrangement techniques are performed better than randomly module arrangement technique with respect to output power for each SP, TCT, BL and HC configurations. Another comparison illustrates that the maximum output power is generated by HC configuration while the minimum is obtained by SP configuration.