Efficient Modeling of Three Types Photovoltaic Panels Characteristics with Experimental Validation under Variable Weather Conditions

This paper presents a validation of a proposal combined analytical and numerical approach applied to a single diode model of photovoltaic (PV) module for extracting its five PV parameters: shunt resistance, series resistance, diode ideality factor, photo-generated current and saturation current. This method is tested using data provided by manufacturer’s datasheets for three PV panels technologies: multicrystalline Kyocera (KC175GHT-2), monocrystalline Silicon Shell (SQ-150PC) and heterojunction with amorphous silicon “intrinsic thin-layer” “HIT-240HDE4” under variable environmental conditions. The simulation results in MATLAB environment show a good agreement between simulated and experimental power-voltage and current-voltage characteristics for different irradiation levels and temperature values. This accuracy of the proposed method has been confirmed by lowest root mean square error (RMSE) whatever the weather conditions compared to recent conventional approaches reported in the literature. Furthermore, this new approach is tested experimentally on three types of photovoltaic modules’ data provided by “NREL”: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, USA. An accurate knowledge of photovoltaic panel parameters from measurement data is essential for solar panels quality control, design and estimating their performance. Indeed, the photovoltaic panel is prone to degrading over time owing to aging and weather exposure. Therefore, predicting these performance degradations is key to avoid their negative impacts on PV production. For this purpose, this work presents a fast, simple, and precise approach of PV parameters extraction to obtain an exact model which more accurately emulates the photovoltaic modules characteristics under a large interval of temperature and irradiation levels, and valid for different PV technologies. Also, from the performance comparison of these three PV panel technologies, we have concluded that the monocrystalline module shows the best performance on the Cocoa, Florida (subtropical climate) with an average performance ratio of 100%.