A proposed method to extract maximum possible power in the shortest time on solar PV arrays under partial shadings using metaheuristic algorithms

The increasing use of fossil fuels to produce energy is leading to environmental problems. Hence, it has led the human society to move towards the use of renewable energies, including solar energy. In recent years, one of the most popular methods to gain energy is using photovoltaic arrays to produce solar energy. Skyscrapers and different weather conditions cause shadings on these PV arrays, which leads to less power generation. Various methods such as TCT and Sudoku patterns have been proposed to improve power generation for partial shading PV arrays, but these methods have some problems such as not generating maximum power and being designed for a specific dimension of PV arrays. Therefore, we proposed a metaheuristic algorithm-based approach to extract maximum possible power in the shortest possible time. In this paper, five algorithms which have proper results in most of the searching problems are chosen from different groups of metaheuristic algorithms. Also, four different standard shading patterns are used for more realistic analysis. Results show that the proposed method achieves better results in maximum power generation compared to TCT arrangement (18.53%) and Sudoku arrangement (4.93%). Also, the results show that GWO is the fastest metaheuristic algorithm to reach maximum output power in PV arrays under partial shading condition. Thus, the authors believe that by using metaheuristic algorithms, an efficient, reliable, and fast solution is reached to solve partial shading PV arrays problem