Capacitor-less photovoltaic (PV) cell-level power balancing using diffusion charge redistribution

This paper presents a new strategy, diffusion charge redistribution (DCR), for balancing power among photovoltaic cells to increase energy extraction and to improve maximum power point tracking (MPPT) efficiency under partial shading conditions. With DCR, testing and binning during cell manufacturing can be eliminated, and significant cost savings can be achieved during production. The proposed technique performs power balancing by taking advantage the intrinsic diffusion capacitance of the solar cells and requires no external passive components for energy storage, thereby minimizing power electronics cost and complexity. Strings balanced by this technique exhibit power versus current curves that are convex, which also greatly reduces the cost and complexity of the required MPPT algorithm.