Thermo-electrical modeling of light wavelength effects on photovoltaic cell performance.

Solar energy has emerged as a renewable, clean, reliable, and free source of energy encapsulated in photovoltaic (PV) cells. Studying the factors and parameters that affect the performance of these cells is significantly helping researchers to understand, design, develop, and optimize them. It has been reported that PV cell performance is highly affected by operating temperature. PV module temperature is a function of the incident radiant power density, the output electrical power, the thermal properties of the semiconductor material of the module, and the ambient temperature. Only part of the incident solar spectrum is converted into electricity, while the rest is dissipated as heat. This heat significantly increases the module temperature. Several researchers introduced thermal models to predict the module temperature, while others combined thermal and electrical models to get more accurate results. The radiant power density (W/m2) is used in these models as input power to the PV module. Despite of the extensive research, researchers failed to find models in the literature that investigated the effects of each wavelength of the spectral irradiance (W/m2/nm) on the module temperature. In this work, an integrated thermo-electrical model is proposed to predict the temperature of the PV module. In this model, the individual spectral irradiances are considered as input power sources to the module. Since the power associated with each wavelength varies during the day due to the airmass, the instantaneous temperature of the module is predicted over the entire day for a specific location. The calculated instantaneous output power is compared with the module's data sheet measurement and shows good agreement. Furthermore, research is planned to measure the module temperature experimentally, and these results are expected in the final version. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]