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Finding the equivalent circuit parameters for photovoltaic (PV) cells is crucial as they are used in the modeling and analysis of PV arrays. PV cells are made of silicon. These materials have a nonlinear characteristic. This distorts the sinusoidal waveform of the current and voltage. As a result, harmonic components are formed in the system. The PV cell is the smallest building block of the PV system and produces voltages between 0.5 V and 0.7 V. It serves as a source of current. The amount of radiation hitting the cell determines how much current it produces. In an ideal case, a diode and a parallel current source make up the equivalent circuit of the PV cell. In practice, the addition of a series and parallel resistor is made to the ideal equivalent circuit. There are many equivalent circuits in the literature on modeling the equivalent circuit of a PV cell. The PV cell single–diode model is the most used model due to its ease of analysis. In this study, the iterative method by Newton–Raphson was used to find the equivalent circuit parameters of a PV cell. This method is one of the most widely used methods for determining the roots of nonlinear equations in numerical analysis. In this study, five unknown parameters (Iph, Io, Rs, Rsh and m) of the PV cell equivalent circuit were quickly discovered with the software program prepared based on the Newton–Raphson method in MATLAB. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.