Performance of Solar Photovoltaic System Under Partial Shading Conditions Using an Improved Cuckoo Search Algorithm

The power generated by Photovoltaic (PV) system strongly depends upon the incident radiation. The uniform incident radiation across the PV panel is required for efficient operation of PV system. Partial shading of PV panel gives many local maximum power points and one global MPP in the power-voltage graph of PV system. The traditional maximum point tracking (MPPT) methods are incapable to achieve this global MPP when PV panel is shaded non-uniformly resulting in inefficient performance of PV system. Therefore, alternate methods for MPPT tracking must be designed for tracking global MPP in partially shaded conditions. Performance of PV system can also be evaluated for various configurations of PV arrays like series and series-parallel. This paper provides the solution for tracking global MPP when series configured PV panel is partially shaded. MATLAB-based simulation model gives improved results for partially shaded PV panel with different shading patterns.