Issues in design and control of chain connected DC to DC converters

The main challenge of extracting the maximum power available from serially connected photovoltaic (PV) elements is the need for different bias operation currents. Generally in order to overcome this challenge DC-to-DC converters or micro inverters (DC-to-AC) are used to load every PV element by its maximum power point (MPP) load. Recently an increased research effort has been invested in an alternative solution based on a differential power processing architecture. The main profit of this architecture lies in the processing of only the necessary differential power for all the PV elements MPP operation.