Development Of A Solar Cell Model In Matlab For PV Based Generation System

Solar PV based electricity generation is gaining importance due to its abundant availability and improvements in materials and energy conversion technology. Global warming and fossil fuel depletion is indirectly catalyzing this transformation process. As the solar power conversion is already a low efficient conversion process, accurate and reliable modelling of solar cell is imperative to optimize the design of the solar PV system. Due to the non-linear nature of its characteristics, accurate modelling of a solar cell is still a difficult task. The existing models do suffer in a few issues while developing an integrated solar PV power conversion system. This paper compares two of the existing models for solar cell in MATLAB with a newly proposed model. To analyse and validate the results of the simulation models, I-V and P-V characteristics obtained from all the three models are compared with the experimental characteristics obtained from a 50W photovoltaic module. Finally relative merits and demerits of all the three models are discussed.