Abstract: Ever increasing energy demand, owing to population growth, technology development, and industrial expansion, has led to exploring alternative sources for energy generation. Renewable energy sources such as Photovoltaic (PV) are help in reducing the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and mitigate this global warming. Solar energy emerged as the most effective and reliable source of renewable energy as it is pollution free, less maintenance, recyclable and inexhaustible. Photo Voltaic (PV) technology is used for direct conversion of e solar energy into electrical energy. The performance of PV system is mostly affected by irradiance, module temperature and array configuration. The knowledge of relationship between these effects and the output power of the PV array is very important while analyzing the performance of the PV system. This paper presents a MATLAB-programmed model to study the I-V and P-V characteristics of PV array under non-uniform insolation caused by both partially and completely shaded modules. In the first part, with the developed MATLAB/Simulink model the performance characteristics of PV array is illustrated by analyzing the different shading situations, then the impact of shading on PV array is illustrated experimentally by measurements on an array with 3 series connected 60W modules. Both developed model and experimental results shows that, under the non-uniform insolation condition, the output power of a PV array get reduced and output PV curve become more complex with multiple peaks.

Keywords: PV module, PV array, Partial shading, MATLAB Simulink, MATLAB program.