Parameter Extraction of Solar Photovoltaic Models Using Enhanced Levy Flight Based Grasshopper Optimization Algorithm

Recently, solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are becoming the tendency theme motivating researchers focus. The appropriate design of PV cells is an important task, challenged by the development of a useful model able to simulate the current vs voltage characteristics of the real solar cell and the accurate estimation of the PV cell’s parameter values. This paper proposes an improved Levy flight based grasshopper optimization algorithm (LGOA) to estimate the parameters of three PV models, i.e., single diode, double diode, and PV module. The incorporation of Levy flight trajectory to the basic grasshopper optimization algorithm (GOA), ensure solutions diversity and enhances the exploration and exploitation capabilities as well. To further validate its effectiveness LGOA is applied to the Sharp ND-R250A5 module under different operating conditions of irradiance and temperature. Experimental results demonstrate that LGOA has the ability to extract the parameters of PV models with high performance and good accuracy compared to the standard GOA.