A complete and simplified datasheet-based model of pv cells in variable environmental conditions for circuit simulation

Abstract

The paper proposes two mathematical models of a photo-voltaic (PV) cell-the completemodel and the simplified model-which can be used also for modeling a PV module or a PV stringunder any environmental condition. Both of them are based on the well-known five-parametersmodel, while the approach allows to write a new descriptive equation, whose terms are functionsof the information always available in the modern datasheet of a PV module's manufacturer.This implies that no pre-processing of the datasheet parameters is needed to use the proposedmodel, whichever the solar irradiance and the cell/module temperature are. Moreover, these modelsare interpreted from a circuital point of view, providing the electrical circuits constituted only by basicelectrical components. Particularly, in order to take into account the variability of the environmentparameters, several variable resistors and voltage-controlled sources are used. The proposed modelsare tested with the datasheet parameters of commercial PV modules.