A Novel Controller for Multiple Ladder Cuk Converters for Balancing Photovoltaic Modules

CHIACCHIARINI, HECTOR; CECI, JONATAN; OLIVA, ALEJANDRO RAUL; MANDOLESI, PABLO

Cordoba

Congreso; XVI Reunión en Procesamiento de la Información y Control; 2015

UTN y UNC

Partial shading is undeniably one ofthe most severe problems in photovoltaic power harvesting at residential locations. Hardware architectures have proven to be valuable, since they can virtuallyeliminate the power loss induced by partial shading.Actually, it depends on the architecture?s granularitylevel. Working at cell level will result in a photovoltaicmodule that does not suffer from partial shading. However, the controller complexity and computationaleffort grows rapidly as the number of series cells increases. This work proposes a simple alternative to reduce the order of the control strategy while still maintaining total control of the system operating point. Atwo-level strategy based on discrete controllers is actually used to drive the entire system (composed of 12cells) to its global maximum power point (MPP). Theperformance of the developed controller is tested through simulations that show promising results.