Development of a methodology to simulate simple mismatching in photovoltaic systems

Sammanfattning: The currently available tools to simulate solar photovoltaic (PV) systems do not offer a reliable solution to simulate string or module level inverter systems with partial shading and modules with mismatching electrical characteristics. The available methodologies to simulate this satisfying require computational power that is not commonly available. To make it possible to simulate these kinds of systems a methodology based around the software “System Advisory Model” (SAM) is proposed. The methodology assumes that shading is binary, meaning a module can either be fully shaded or not shaded at all. Two different global IV curve models are presented and evaluated in comparison with a more detailed Matlab global IV model based on the one diode equivalent circuit. All these methodologies disregards the impact of the bypass diodes in the PV module and this is considered a significant error, which has to be quantified. It is proposed that this should be done by using the two-diode equivalent circuit instead of the one diode model. Finally the methodology is not concluded to be reliable until verified in comparison with real world data.