Abstract
This paper presents photovoltaic-oriented nodal analysis (PVONA), a general and flexible tool for efficient spatially resolved simulations for photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules. This approach overcomes the major problem of the conventional Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis-based approaches for solving circuit network models, which is the limited number of nodes that can be simulated due to memory and computing time requirements. PVONA integrates a specifically designed sparse data structure and a graphics processing unit-based parallel conjugate gradient algorithm into a PV-oriented iterative Newton–Raphson solver. This first avoids the complicated and time-consuming netlist parsing, second saves memory space, and third accelerates the simulation procedure. In the tests, PVONA generated the local current and voltage maps of a model with $316 \times 316$ nodes with a thin-film PV cell in 15 s, i.e., using only 4.6% of the time required by the latest LTSpice package. The 2-D characterization is used as a case study and the potential application of PVONA toward quantitative analysis of electroluminescence are discussed.
Highlights
P HOTOVOLTAIC (PV) cells are often simplified as a lumped diode model without spatial considerations
Tests based on a normal PC with a consumer-level graphics card and achieved significantly improvements than the conventional Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE)-based approaches, demonstrating the ability to simulate mega-pixel camera images and requiring about 5% of the time required by a SPICE version used for comparative purposes
An spatially resolved model (SRM) of a PV cell is composed by an array of finite areas, i.e., subcells, where each one is an analogue of a segment of the PV material
Summary
P HOTOVOLTAIC (PV) cells are often simplified as a lumped diode model without spatial considerations. The commonly used luminescence imaging in industrial environments is often qualitative and does not realize the full potential of these measurements This requires a tool that allows the modeling of the local electrical properties in a 2-D approach, with reasonable spatial resolution (e.g., equivalent to a mega-pixel image) in an industrially relevant speed. The SPICE-based approaches require complicated preparation (e.g., generating and parsing net lists) and significant memory consumption and long execution time increasing quadratically with node number, which rule them out for high-resolution simulations, e.g., a full-resolution EL image, in industrial environments. A PV-oriented nodal analysis (PVONA) is presented in this paper that allows efficient 2-D simulations of PV cells and modules This is achieved by integrating a designed sparse data structure and a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based parallel conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm into a PV-oriented Newton–Raphson solver. The approach could be deployed on various high-power parallel computing platforms, which should allow deployment in industrial applications
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