A novel method for reference parameters identification and electrical property estimation of PV modules under varying operating conditions

The parameters identification of the diode model under reference condition are crucial and have significant impact on output characteristics estimation of photovoltaic (PV) module under varying operating conditions. The traditional methods of extracting model parameters have always focused on solving the parameter optimization problem only under some certain condition, which neglects their effect of performance estimation under other operating condition. In this paper, a novel method is proposed to identify the reference physical parameters and enhance the accuracy of electrical property estimation for PV modules under varying operating conditions. New objective function with penalty function is constructed by considering the estimated performance not only under reference condition but also under multiple real operating conditions. The maximum permissible error (MPE) is proposed to constrain the accuracy for key electrical output indicators and added in penalty function to ensure the accuracy under reference condition. Taking into account the inequality constraints, the guaranteed convergence particle swarm optimization with penalty function (P-GCPSO) is introduced for parameter identification. A set of comparisons between the measured and calculated results of PV modules indicate that the proposed method substantially more accurate than other documented methods for both single and double diode model. For the six different materials tested, the root mean square error (RMSE) was compared. The RMSE of the single-diode model is reduced by at least 57.98% compared to the compared method, with a maximum reduction of 86.57%. Similarly, the RMSE of the double -diode model was reduced by at least 47.24% with a maximum reduction of 88.71% compared to the compared methods. Additionally, the tests with six different types of PV modules at varying environmental conditions for over one year prove that the proposed method is reliable and practical for real-world applications. The relative error of power generation reached a minimum of 2.20%. This proves the reliability and practicability of the proposed method in practical applications. The proposed method is envisaged to be valuable for both offline analysis and online monitoring applications where an accurate, fast and consistent performance estimation tool is required.