Modeling of photovoltaic cells and arrays based on singular value decomposition

Abstract

An accurate photovoltaic (PV) model is developed based on singular value decomposition (SVD) using measured or simulated data for PV current in terms of cell temperature, solar irradiance and output voltage. The SVD model projects the problem onto a space described by a small number of orthogonal basis functions (or modes). The number of modes adopted for constructing the model is determined based on the magnitudes of the singular values and the desired accuracy. This model is further implemented in a circuit simulator and applied to modeling of a PV array. Two PV test cells are used to verify the validity of the developed model. The SVD model is also demonstrated in a PV array with a non-uniform temperature profile. The developed SVD PV model requires no assumption to construct the model and is remarkably simple and accurate. To our best knowledge, this is the first application of SVD to modeling of semiconductor device characteristics and the first representation of SVD as an electric circuit.