Online Modelling and Calculation for Operating Temperature of Silicon-Based PV Modules Based on BP-ANN

The operating temperature of silicon-based solar modules has a significant effect on the electrical performance and power generation efficiency of photovoltaic (PV) modules. It is an important parameter for PV system modeling, performance evaluation, and maximum power point tracking. The analysis shows that the results of physics-based methods always change with seasons and weather conditions. It is difficult to measure all the needed variables to build the physics-based model for the calculation of operating temperature. Due to the above problem, the paper proposes an online method to calculate operating temperature, which adopts the back propagation artificial neural network (BP-ANN) algorithm. The comparative analysis is carried out using data from the empirical test platform, and the results show that both the BP-ANN and the support vector machine (SVM) method can reach good accuracy when the dataset length was over six months. The SVM method is not suitable for the temperature modeling because its computing time is too long. To improve the performance, wind speed should be taken as one of the models' input if possible. The proposed method is effective to calculate the operating temperature of silicon-based solar modules online, which is a low-cost soft-sensing solution.