Improving electrical energy yield from photovoltaic system under partial shading

The output power of the PV system fluctuates due to the instability of weather conditions, unstable environment, and weather changes. Furthermore, solar irradiance can change suddenly because the sunlight is blocked by obstacles such as a moving cloud, the shadow of a building or tree, and atmospheric conditions. These factors cause an instantaneous change in the peak power. The peak power can vary into multi-peak points with different values, and such a condition is known as partial shading. This work report delivers the improving effort to harvest electrical energy taken from PV systems under partial shading conditions (PSC). By combining two algorithms, namely Simplified Firefly Algorithm (SFA) under multi-peak conditions and the perturb and observe (P&O) for maximum power point tracking (MPPT). The work is carried out using different PV configurations, varying shading patterns, and multi-peak conditions in partial shading conditions. The simulation results have shown satisfactory performance to avoid local maximum power peak and better accuracy in tracking global maximum power peak (GMPP) during partial shading. The maximum electric yield harvested in this work is 363,93 Watt.