**1. Introduction**

As a climate-sustainable solution, the world needs urgent and rapid incorporation of renewable energy (RE) into the global energy scenario. RE sources are commonly known as clean energy solutions, gaining the deep attention of energy users in commercial and domestic applications. The PV energy conversion method has received immense attention from researchers in recent days [1]. Concerns about the worldwide energy problems and the threat of climate change posed by existing energy sources have spurred the research for alternative energy sources. The most popular renewable energy source is solar PV, which is nonpolluting and requires no maintenance [2].

During the first half of 2020, thirteen countries pledged the largest amount of new RE ever, nearly 50 GW, to be installed in the year span of 2021–2024. Global demand in 2021 is expected to be 25% higher than in 2020 [3,4]. The researchers performed different studies to establish an effective and stable conversion of solar PV energy. Module mismatching and PSCs are two key contributors to PV system losses. Under these conditions, the PV system

**Citation:** Aljafari, B.; Pachauri, R.K.; Thanikanti, S.B.; Ayodele, B.V. Innovative Methodologies for Higher Global MPP of Photovoltaic Arrays under PSCs: Experimental Validation. *Sustainability* **2023**, *15*, 11852. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su151511852

Academic Editors: Domenico Mazzeo and Cristina Ventura

Received: 9 May 2023 Revised: 20 June 2023 Accepted: 27 July 2023 Published: 1 August 2023

**Copyright:** © 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

(P-V and I-V characteristics) becomes more complex and has many power peaks. The amount of energy made by a PV array is greatly reduced when it is in the shade [5–7]. To boost the efficiency of PV systems, a number of modules are coupled in specified combinations. An evaluation of the most recent research papers is conducted in this work in order to determine the research gap. The many varieties of PV array configurations' performance, reliability, precision, resilience, efficiency and operation are all investigated. There are several things that can cause PSCs, such as passing clouds, high-rise buildings, telecommunications towers, adjacent trees, dead leaves, and so on.

The PV power output is reduced, allowing shaded modules to waste a significant percentage of the power produced by unshaded modules, resulting in hotspots that might eventually destroy the PV cell/module [8,9]. When designing an array, several PV modules are arranged in series and parallel to satisfy the load power demand. Parallel and series configurations of PV modules are used to meet a PV array's power requirements. Traditional and game puzzle-based reconfiguration approaches such as series, series-parallel (SP), bridge-link (BL), total cross-tied (TCT), honey-comb (HC), Latin square (LS), magic square (MS) and Su-Do-Ku (SDK) puzzles have been adopted to design PV array systems.

Because of the way these algorithms are designed, the operative point is the earliest peak in the PV characteristic, which may or may not be a global power peak. Several advancements in the literature have been recorded to promote these algorithms in order to find the global power peak under PSCs. This is accomplished by adding more stages to the algorithm, making it more complex and restricting monitoring speed. Recently, an improved SDK-puzzle-based algorithm for MPP monitoring was discovered to yield good results.
