A novel control architecture for maximum power extraction from the photovoltaic system under partially shaded conditions using current equalization approach

This paper proposes a novel architecture and a control scheme for maximum power extraction from the photovoltaic (PV) system under partial shading conditions. In the proposed architecture, each PV module has a flyback type DC-DC converter with a control scheme. Here, a multiple primary windings and a single secondary winding type transformer is used in the flyback converter. The flyback converter is directly connected to the PV module, so this architecture is called as module integrated converter (MIC). In this study, the number of primary winding of the module integrated converter is made equal to the number of bypass diode of the PV module. In this architecture, current is shared among the primary windings of the module integrated converter to equalize the operating point of each submodule. The current sharing process is achieved by equalizing the secondary voltage to the primary voltage of all submodules. Simulation finding reflects that the power-voltage (P-V) characteristic curve of the photovoltaic module exhibits a single peak due to the same operating point for all the submodules. The overall extracted power level improves more than 25% of the power obtained from the PV system with bypass diodes. The proposed architecture has been simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK for performance verification.