INFLUENCE OF TEMPERATURE ON PERFORMANCE PARAMETERS OF MONO-CRYSTALLINE SILICON SOLAR CELLS
Photovoltaic cells, PV parameters, PV equivalent model, PV Performance.
Over the years, the contribution of photovoltaics energy to an eco-friendly world is continually increasing and its costs reducing. In PV technologies, the solar cell temperature and incident solar radiation are the main factors that affect their behaviors. The focus of this work will be the temperature, in view of the few numbers of investigations currently available in literature which covers simultaneously the equivalent electric models and all aspects of the temperature influence on performance parameters of solar cells. Therefore, to bridge this gap, a study on the impact of cell temperature on the performance parameters of silicon solar cell and a search for the most suitable model to emulate a solar cell when its operation temperature varies are undertaken in this work. The experiment will be carried out using a polycrystalline silicon solar cell with the temperature in the range 20–60 °C at constant light intensity 1,000 W/m2 employing a solar cell simulator (SOLSIM) developed by the INPE and adapted by the author. In this work, the main existing research works on PV cell model parameter estimation problem are classified according to number of parameters, parameters’ extraction, translation equations and PV material technology. The main existent models were discussed pointing out their different levels of approximation. A qualitative comparative ranking was made, and four models was found to be the best ones to emulate PV cells per the aspects considered, and a specific model with greater potential was highlighted. It was made a brief review of the various existing mathematical relationships involving the influence of temperature over solar cells. A possible solution to soften the efficiency reduction caused by the temperature is presented. Using this solution is expected the improvement of the performance of PV devices can be expected.