Suppression strategy of short-term and long-term environmental disturbances for maritime photovoltaic system

The maritime photovoltaic system is easily affected by the special environmental disturbances from the ship and the sea, e.g., the partial and dynamic shadings when moved with a ship, the corrosion of photovoltaic module when continuously worked in high salinity oceanic environment. In this study, the optimal configuration of photovoltaic array installed on large ocean-going ship is developed, and a novel offline/online hybrid maximum power point tracking method is presented to suppress the short-term disturbance caused by the partial and dynamic shadings. Then, in order to dynamically track the corrosion of photovoltaic module and suppress the long-term disturbance, the dynamic knowledge-base with time-window is developed. Finally, the proposed methodology is verified by simulation experiments. Experimental results show that in the proposed configuration, location of the maximum power point is closely related to the area and degree of the shading, but is irrelevant to the distribution. Moreover, according to the experimental results, the operation data in the nearest 3 months to 1 year can be collected and employed to train the offline model, in order to obtain the best control performance. With the proposed configuration and control methodology, the environmental disturbances can be efficiently suppressed, the evaluated system can also obtain efficient and robust control performance under complex maritime environment.