Efficient Tool to Characterize Photovoltaic Generating Systems Using Mine Blast Algorithm

The article proposes an efficient tool to characterize the photovoltaic generating systems. The mine blast algorithm is coupled with the proposed tool to define the parameters for commercial real photovoltaic cells. The objective function is adapted to minimize the absolute errors between the experimental measured and calculated current values to accurately estimate the photovoltaic parameters. The experimental, performance, and technical data of the commercial photovoltaic cells of many manufacturers with different photovoltaic types are used to confirm the viability of the proposed method. Both single-diode and double-diode models of solar cells are approached to certify the performance of the proposed methodology. The calculated I-V and P-V characteristics are well matched to measured data with insignificant absolute errors. The study finds that the single-diode equivalent circuit suffices to precisely model the photovoltaic cells. Numerical comparisons to the other competitive heuristic methods consolidate the significance of the proposed mine blast algorithm based method.