Document Type

Conference Paper

Rights

Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence

Disciplines

Automation and control systems, Computer hardware and architecture, 2.3 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING, Energy and fuels

Publication Details

Environment and Electrical Engineering (EEEIC), 2012 11th International Conference on 2012 Pages: 699 - 705, DOI: 10.1109/EEEIC.2012.6221467

IEEE Conference Publications

Abstract

A DC and AC power simulation comparison of: a Photovoltaic (PV) array with a modular, parallel, AC converter configuration; and a series, string configuration with a central AC converter, is presented. The systems are simulated using a comprehensive range of edge shading scenarios and irradiance conditions. Power control and transformation circuitry must be designed for shade and module mismatch tolerance to prevent over-proportional power to shade losses, as average losses from Building Integrated PV (BIPV) systems are approximately 20 to 25%, due to shade, mismatch, differences in orientation and inclination, and temperature effects. 59.4% of the simulations showed gains in AC power by using the parallel modular converter system, with a maximum gain of 10.74%, when compared with the series configuration. Losses up to 6.61% can be experienced when most of the modules are experiencing edge shading of 200 or 400W/m2, as i) the converter efficiency is lower in this power range for the modular converter, and ii) this low efficiency conversion occurs n times, where n is the number of modules in the array. Significant power increases are experienced by the parallel modular system when there is a wide distribution of irradiance levels within the shading pattern.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1109/EEEIC.2012.6221467

Funder

TECHNOLOGICAL SECTOR RESEARCH (2007) STRAND III

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