Abstract
The susceptibility of the PV array towards partial shading has raised a major reliability concern for efficient power generation. The partial shading forces the arrays to generate lower power along with forming non-convex curves causing complicated operation of power tracking algorithms. Hence, to reduce the losses, various conventional configurations and reconfiguration techniques exist with vulnerabilities in terms of reliable power enhancement and complexity. In this paper, a highly reliable, less complex, and fast array reconfiguration based on the Dragonfly algorithm (DA) optimization with a higher power enhancement capability, lower computational time, and hasty convergence is proposed for unwanted shading losses reduction in arrays. The effectiveness of the proposed reconfiguration is evaluated against conventional configurations and three pre-existing reconfiguration techniques under various artificial shading cases via power generation, losses, and efficiencies using simulation and experimental analysis for 3 × 3 and 9 × 9 arrays. From the conducted analysis, it has been established that the DA reconfiguration has 22%, 10.10%, 15.36%, 5.85%, 2.95%, 2.55%, and 1.07% higher power generation than the conventional configurations, electrical reconfiguration, SD-PAR, Sudoku, GA, PSO, and EAR respectively with reduced switches counts.
•Dragonfly optimization based reconfiguration for shaded PV arrays is proposed.•Compared with existing configurations in simulation and real-time scenario.•Applicable for symmetric and asymmetric arrays with reduced number of switches.•22%, 10%, 2.95% and 1.07% higher power than static, dynamic and EAR.