Irradiance-Driven Partial Reconfiguration of PV Panels

Adaptive reconfiguration of a photo-voltaic (PV) panel by means of a switch network is a well-known approach to tackle shading issues dynamically and with a reasonable cost. Most of these approaches assume however that the entire panel is reconfigurable, resulting in high installation costs due to the large wiring overhead required by this solution. In this work we propose an architecture in which only a portion of the panel is made reconfigurable, while minimizing the loss in the extracted power with respect to a fully reconfigurable solution. The key feature of our approach is the use of environmental (irradiance and temperature) data to determine the reconfigurable subset at design time. Simulation results show that, by reconfiguring only about 50-70% of a panel, it is possible to achieve up to 45% power increase with respect to a static topology, while losing less than 5% power with respect to full reconfiguration.