A Simple Energy Recovery Scheme to Harvest the Energy from Shaded Photovoltaic Modules During Partial Shading

This paper proposes a simple circuit to recover the energy that otherwise would be lost due to the partial shadings on PV modules. Since the circuit can be readily retrofitted to an existing PV system, no modification on the central inverter is required. The main idea of the scheme is, during partia...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ramli, Mohd zulkifli, Zainal, Salam
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2014
Subjects:
Online Access:http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/11579/1/TPEL2302007.pdf
http://eprints.utem.edu.my/id/eprint/11579/
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Institution: Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka
Language: English
Description
Summary:This paper proposes a simple circuit to recover the energy that otherwise would be lost due to the partial shadings on PV modules. Since the circuit can be readily retrofitted to an existing PV system, no modification on the central inverter is required. The main idea of the scheme is, during partial shading, parts of the current from the non-shaded modules are harvested by an energy recovery circuit using power electronics switches and storage components. In doing so, the current of the PV string is maintained on the level generated by the shaded module. There is no need for the shaded module to be short-circuited; as a result, it can still actively produce output power (despite being partially shaded). To investigate the idea, the proposed circuit is retrofitted to a prototype PV system using eight modules. The partial shading conditions are emulated using a solar simulator with a controllable irradiance capability. The results are validated by a good agreement between the experimental and simulation works.