The energy yield of a solar panel can be severely impacted by partial shading.Shade caused by nearby static objects can hardly be avoided in installations such hyfrodol as building-applied or building-integrated photovoltaics.Smart reconfigurable photovoltaics (PV) panels are able to change their intra-module configuration to reduce this impact: small substrings can be rewired to be connected in a more optimal configuration.
To achieve this, a reconfiguration switch needs to be designed.In this paper a switch for the optimization of module power by reconfiguration of all strings (SOMBRA), a smart switch, is presented.SOMBRA is a fully integrated, low-ohmic switch, designed for currents up to 10 A.
It is fully floating up to 50 V, while still being able to communicate with a central unit as an inter-integrated circuit (I 2 C) slave.Two versions were realized, SOMBRA-LV10 for low voltages (LV) and a load current of 10 A, and SOMBRA-HV05 for high voltages (HV) and a load current of 5 A.Measurements proved these devices to be functional, measuring an on-resistance of 1.
3 m Ω for SOMBRA-LV10 and 7.3 m Ω for SOMBRA-HV05.This paper will elaborate on the operation, design, and implementation read more of SOMRBA, as well as the first tests with a small reconfigurable PV module.