An Outdoor Platform for PV Ageing Studies: Electrical Parameters Extraction from Iv Curves
Abstract
Accurate models for solar technologies are essential to evaluate the lifetime, ageing and degradation modes of these devices, depending on local climatic constraints. In this context, the DURASOL project aims to provide more sophisticated tools and methods for solar industries, based on studies in multi-site facilities with indoor and outdoor platforms under diverse and complementary climates. For solar cells and modules, simple diode modelling allows to determine several electrical parameters from IV curves: the series and shunt resistances, the photocurrent, the reverse saturation current of diode and the diode ideality factor. These parameters can be used for various applications such as analyze of performance losses, quality control and devices improvements. In this paper, we focus on their extraction through a Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. Three approaches are compared, based on a direct optimization of the five electrical parameters and on the use of the short-circuit current Isc and the open-circuit voltage Voc. The tests realized on a synthetic IV curve show that the use of Voc leads to a more robust and accurate model with both exact and noisy data.
Keywords
Photovoltaic, Simple diode model, Iv curve, Parameters extraction, Particle swarm optimization