Wednesday, 30 January 2013

Introduction to the Photovoltaic Array



After the first meeting with our supervisor, we begun to learn about the material provided by our supervisor. The first part was to know about what the photovoltaic array is and what it can be used for.

The photovoltaic solar cell is one of the renewable energy sources and plays an important role in electricity generation. The solar photovoltaic array is researched and used to convert the solar energy into electrical energy. It is a good effective, harmless, environmental energy source. However, the drawbacks are that the cost of photovoltaic array cells is high and the output voltage is not steady. It can be affected by the solar radiation energy and the cell operating temperature. Our work is to design the equivalent circuit of photovoltaic cell, research the effect of the solar irradiation level and the ambient temperature on the array current and array voltage, then simulate the current-voltage characteristic curve and the power-voltage characteristic curve by using Matlab-Simulink.