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Renewable energy sources are receiving wide popularity due to the shortage of fossil fuels and environmental problems caused by conventional energy sources. Solar photovoltaic energy is a widely used sustainable energy source. The power developed by a solar cell is greatly influenced by the insolation level. Partial shading occurs when one or more photovoltaic (PV) cells receive lesser radiation as compared to other cells, which in turn affects the overall electrical performance of PV cells including reduced generated power. This paper proposes a newly developed configuration known as Reformed-Total cross-tied (R-TCT) to improve the power generation during partially shaded conditions in small-scale PV systems, especially for urban and rural area applications. The basic idea of this paper is to redistribute the shaded modules of a row to other rows such that the number of shaded solar PV modules of each row are nearly same. The proposed method is validated by simulation and also by hardware implementation. The simulations and experiments are done on eight different shading cases and found that the proposed method gives either superior or same performance as that of existing TCT, LS (Latin Square)-TCT, and D-TCT configurations.

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