An accurate approach for modeling I-V characteristics of photovoltaic generators based on the two-diode model

Abstract

• A new hybrid method is proposed to extract seven parameter values of PV modules. • The proposed method is not based on any approximation. • The performance is evaluated using PV panels of various technologies. • Accuracy is tested using experimental data against recent optimization algorithms. • The best performance and speed of convergence of the new method are proved. In this paper, the two-diode circuit model with seven parameters is used to model the electrical properties and the physical effects of photovoltaic modules. In this article, only the available information about the photovoltaic panel on its manufacturer’s datasheet is required to extract the model’s seven parameters. The newly proposed method is based on the reduced forms approach; the search space is reduced from seven to only three unknown parameters to extract numerically. In order to make the extraction simple and faster, just one iterative process is required to get the values of the three unknown parameters simultaneously. The four remaining parameters are calculated analytically using four analytical equations gotten by exploiting the values of the three remarkable points of the current–voltage (I-V) characteristic under standard test conditions provided by the manufacturer and without using any approximations. In addition to the simplicity that characterizes the method in this paper, the high efficiency of the proposed model is proved using three photovoltaic panels of different technologies for which the current approach provides the lowest errors compared to other recent numerical methods of the literature. Next, the proposed method is also transformed and used as an optimization algorithm that achieves higher levels of precision and speed of convergence than the most recent and advanced meta-heuristic optimization algorithms.