(United States Patent and Trademark Office, 2017-06-20)
Approximately one-half of the loss of delivered power from a solar panel having photovoltaic (PV) cells connected in series to form sub-panels due to shading is recovered at low hardware cost by connecting sub-panels in series and providing maximum power point tracking control in common for the series connected sub-panels such that the respective sub-panels produce equal voltages even in the presence of shading of a portion of one or more sub-panels. By doing so, the input voltage of respective power converters which control the voltage at which each sub-panel is operated can be placed close to the maximum power point of each sub-panel regardless of shading and maximum total power harvested even though the respective sub-panels are not operated at optimum voltages.