PV Panel Modeling: a mobile application for modeling photovoltaic panels using datasheets information

Over the past years, different approaches have been proposed for circuital modeling photovoltaic modules. Most of these approaches introduce simplifications and/or approximations techniques or exploit inaccurate data interpolated from the plots representing panel characteristic curves: this in order to overcome the treatment of transcendental equations or to add points for numerical fitting. Unfortunately, this leads to ineffective algorithms and inaccurate results. In this work, we propose a fast and powerful mobile application, named PV Panel Modeling, for the identification of PV panels from datasheet. PV Panel Modeling is based on a complete theoretical and practical analysis on the extraction of one-diode model parameters. In particular, the proposed procedure separates the independent parameters from the dependent ones by using suitable algebraic manipulations of the commonly used equations. Hence, it is possible to verify the open circuit, short circuit and maximum power point conditions, and to reduce the dimensions of the search space of the parameters. The application and its core are designed in order to be cross platform and ensure high performances. Here, we propose an implementation for handheld devices based on Android operating system. Finally, the obtained results have been validated on hundreds of PV panels belonging to the California Energy Commission database.