A novel low-power active bypass approach for photovoltaic panels

A novel active bypass approach for shaded photovoltaic panels embedded in a string is presented, which benefits from the low voltage drop across a bipolar transistor operated in saturation, whose activation is automatically handled by a circuit comprising a pair of MOS transistors only. The functioning principle of the proposed system is carefully discussed, and the improvement in comparison to the traditional diode-based scheme is clarified.