Modeling impact of bypass diodes on photovoltaic cell performance under partial shading

Partial shading across solar cells can cause large reverse voltages and reduce the maximum generated output power. The effects of shading can be mitigated via the use of bypass diodes across the shaded cells. The impact of using bypass diodes on the solar cell performance under shading has been studied at a module level using MATLAB. Algorithms have been designed to study the effects of non-overlapping bypass diode configuration in a randomly shaded solar module and results have been compared with modules devoid of bypass diodes. I-V and P-V curves have been plotted and maximum peak power is tracked for severe to intermediate levels of shading patterns.