An Efficient and Simple Method for Modelling Solar Cells

Abstract

Accurate and reliable PV device modelling is a fundamental tool to optimize system performance. The regular operation of the PV system in an outdoor condition implies the need for a model that relate the environmental effects. This paper presents a new, simple, and efficient method for constructing the I-V characteristics for a PV cell incorporating the environmental conditions. The proposed model is based on the idea of dividing the voltage axis of the solar cell I-V characteristics using a fixed time interval. For each voltage interval point, a two-dimensional current matrix is calculated, corresponding different irradiance conditions and temperatures. Polynomial surface fitting is used to build sub-models for each voltage interval. The current two-dimensional matrix, for each point, is calculated by two different methods. The first method is based on linear interpolation of the measured I-V curves. The second method uses pre-extracted five parameters for the well known single diode model at a wide range of environmental conditions. The developed modelling technique provides accurate results compared with the measured data for a mono-crystalline solar cell.