Enhancement of the characteristic of PV array under partial shading condition

Abstract

The photovoltaic (PV) Power generation has several merits like free fuel cost, little maintenance, cleanness and causing no noise because of the absence of moving parts. The Egyptian government moves towards encouraging the consumer to generate electricity from PV system and issues new electricity law that allows the consumer to sell the superfluous of PV array generated power to utility. Partial shading is one of the obstacles for propagation of PV array. The photovoltaic (PV) Partial shading may occur by neighbor building, trees, dust, and clouds. The effectiveness of partial shading on the PV array performance are loss in the PV array output power, presence of multiple Maximum power peaks (MPP) that causes difficulty of tracking MPP and global MPP occurred at relative low voltage. All these effects are considered in literature review. Also, a comparative literature review and different methods for mitigating these bad effects are provided.