Fast Partial Shading Analysis of Large-scale Photovoltaic Arrays via Tearing Method

Mao Zhang; Sunan Zhong; Weiping Zhang

Fast Partial Shading Analysis of Large-scale Photovoltaic Arrays via Tearing Method

Mao Zhang

Sunan Zhong

Weiping Zhang

Vol. 18, No. 5, pp. 1489-1500, Sep. 2018

10.6113/JPE.2018.18.5.1489

Partial shading

Photo voltaic (PV) array

Piece-wise linear circuit

Simulation efficiency

Tearing method

PDF Full-Text

Abstract

Partial shading analysis of large-scale photovoltaic (PV) arrays has recently become a theoretically and numerically challenging issue, and it is necessary for PV system designers. The main contributions of this study are the following: 1) A PSIM-based macro-model was employed because it is remarkably fast, has high precision, and has no convergence issues. 2) Three types of equivalent macro-models were developed for the transformation of a small PV sub-array with uniform irradiance to a new macro-model. 3) On the basis of the proposed new macro-model, a tearing method was established, which can divide a large-scale PV array into several small sub-arrays to significantly improve the efficiency improvement of a simulation. 4) Three platforms, namely, PSIM, PSpice, and MATLAB, were applied to evaluate the proposed tearing method. The proposed models and methods were validated, and the value of this research was highlighted using an actual large-scale PV array with 2420 PV modules. Numerical simulation demonstrated that the tearing method can remarkably improve the simulation efficiency by approximately thousands of times, and the method obtained a precision of nearly 6.5%. It can provide a useful tool to design the optimal configuration of a PV array with a given shading pattern as much as possible.

Statistics

Show / Hide Statistics

Cumulative Counts from September 30th, 2019
Multiple requests among the same browser session are counted as one view. If you mouse over a chart, the values of data points will be shown.

Cite this article

[IEEE Style]

M. Zhang, S. Zhong, W. Zhang, "Fast Partial Shading Analysis of Large-scale Photovoltaic Arrays via Tearing Method," Journal of Power Electronics, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 1489-1500, 2018. DOI: 10.6113/JPE.2018.18.5.1489.

[ACM Style]

Mao Zhang, Sunan Zhong, and Weiping Zhang. 2018. Fast Partial Shading Analysis of Large-scale Photovoltaic Arrays via Tearing Method. Journal of Power Electronics, 18, 5, (2018), 1489-1500. DOI: 10.6113/JPE.2018.18.5.1489.