Improving the efficiency of photovoltaic cells embedded in floating buoys

Abstract

Solar cells are used to power floating buoys, which is one of their applications. Floating buoys are devices that are placed on the sea and ocean surfaces to provide various information to the floats. Because these cells are subjected to varying environmental conditions, modeling and simulating photovoltaic cells enables us to install cells with higher efficiency and performance in them. The parameters of the single diode model are examined in this article so that the I-V, P-V diagrams, and characteristics of the cadmium telluride (CdTe) photovoltaic cell designed with three layers (CdTe, CdS, and SnOx) can be extracted using a solar cell capacitance simulator (SCAPS) software, and we obtain the parameters of the single diode model using the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm. In this paper, the objective function is root mean square error (RMSE), and the best value obtained after 30 runs is 5.2217×10-5 in 2.46 seconds per iteration, indicating a good agreement between the simulated model and the real model and outperforms many other algorithms that have been developed thus far. The above optimization with 200 iterations, a population of 30, and 84 points was completed on a server with 32 gigabytes of random-access memory (RAM) and 30 processing cores.