Electrical Characterization of PV Modules employing Supercapacitors – A Scalable Method for Field Metrology

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) Energy Conversion is currently the most trusted potential avenue for generating electrical power. Currently, the price of conventional grid electricity is globally on the rise, where as the prices of PV modules (building Blocks for any PV system) are gradually on the decline. So there is every reason to trust that Solar Photo-voltaic systems (SPS) will emerge as a cheap and decentralized source of electricity in a big way in course of a decade. In the measurement procedure followed by the authors, Supercapacitor(s) are used as load to the PV module under test. A detailed investigation regarding quality of measurements has been carried out taking into consideration the effect of a wide range of climatic variations. Experimental values of fill-factor and peak power over a broad range of insolation spectrum have been obtained which yield a fairly consistent pattern for varying capacities of PV modules. Regression analysis for linearity check has been done to establish the effectiveness and reliability of the developed characterization system.