Performance Analysis of Solar PV System under Shading Condition

Partial shading reduces the harvested electrical energy generated by solar photovoltaic system (SPVS). Under this condition, the power-voltage curve of SPVS contains one global and some local maximum power points. Traditional trackers like perturb and observe cannot extract the global maximum point. Therefore, to enhance PV system efficacy, mitigation of partial shading condition must be solved. Conventional maximum power point tracking (MPPT) techniques are normally employed for maximizing the SPVS output power continuously under uniform solar irradiance without any problems. The main disadvantage of these techniques is failing extraction of global MPP under shadowing condition. This paper presents a performance of global MPPT based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The obtained results are compared with incremental resistance method. The results confirmed that PSO based tracker guarantee convergence to the global MPP under different partial shading patterns and they have the best performance in comparison with the conventional ones.