Partial shading modeling of photovoltaic system with experimental validations

This paper proposes an effective technique to model photovoltaic characteristics under various environmental circumstances including non-shaded and partially shaded conditions. The technique has been developed based on experimental study. It provides a versatile model using PSCAD which can represent any form of PV array with any configuration of bypass diodes. The impact of various partially shaded conditions as well as different temperature and solar irradiance levels can be simulated. In this method, the variation of PV model parameters with respect to temperature and solar irradiance are taken into account. Therefore, the proposed model generates more accurate results compared to some previously proposed models. In this paper, a single PV module has been experimentally tested and modeled. The modeling results for various partially shaded conditions have been validated with the experimental data. The model can be extended further to a PV array with different configurations.