Power generation efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) arrays is significantly affected by partial shading and PV cell damage. Partial shading or PV cell damage induces mismatched power generation among PV panels due to tuning on bypass diodes which causes an efficiency loss of power generation. Mismatched PV array can be recovered by reconfiguring connections among PV panels in it.
Though several reconfiguration methods have been proposed, most works consider
reconfiguration in PV cell or PV module level. However, cell level reconfiguration
requires a significantly high computation time and a large number of
switches for reconfiguration. In addition, they require a special PV panels with
capability of switching, and cannot be applied to the system constructed with
standard PV panels. From a practical view, reconfiguration of connections among
PV panels is a realistic solution since a PV panel is manufactured as a physical
one panel with two terminals and PV panels can be flexibly interconnected.
In this paper, we introduce a feasibility check problem of PV panel configuration. This problem identifies whether a connection among PV panels can be configured from a given PV module level solution. We also propose two algorithms for the feasibility check problem. Proposed algorithms are evaluated by comparison with the exhaustive search through random shading distributed PV array. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can identify feasible configurations more than 49,000 times faster than the exhaustive search with around 0.5% errors.