An Innovative Transition Unit for Voltage Regulation in Solar Panel Systems

Partial shading continues to pose a substantial obstacle in photovoltaic (PV) systems, frequently resulting in substantial decreases in system efficiency and energy output. One of the techniques used to mitigate the effect of partial shading is the hierarchical dynamic reconfiguration. It is based the combination scheme of PV panels as the elemental building block. This paper, introduces a simple adaptive PV panel combiner called the Transition Unit (TU) to control the configuration of PV panels in real-time based on shading conditions. The proposed TU system is practically implemented and tested under different shading conditions. The results show that it is capable to produce a more stable and higher output as compared to conventional parallel combiner and microcontroller (MC) based systems by 21% and 6%, respectively. The TU system does not involve MCs and hence ignores hardware and software complexity, which emphasizes its significance with respect to MC based counterparts. Therefore, the proposed TU system can be considered as an effective and sustainable approach to enhance the efficiency of the PV systems subjected to partial shading