A simple solar simulator with highly stable controlled irradiance for solar panel characterization

Abstract

A solar simulator suitable for universities' lab was designed and developed using a quartz tungsten halogen lamp as its light source, an alternating current phase-cut dimmer, a light intensity meter, and an ATMega328p microcontroller with a computer and a liquid crystal display. Noting that the quartz tungsten halogen lamp suffers bulb overheating and longterm degradation that leads to the decrease in its light intensity, a control mechanism was applied. The control mechanism employed a proportional-integral-differential action with Some-Overshoot Ziegler-Nichols tuning rule. It was shown that the control mechanism works well in stabilizing the quartz tungsten halogen lamp irradiance between 273 and 1182 W/m 2. The developed solar simulator was then tested to obtain I-V (current-voltage) characteristics of 3 W peak and 5 W peak commercial solar panels (GH Solar, GH5P-9). Based on the gained I-V characteristics, it was shown that the obtained characteristics of the commercial solar panels are in the range of the characteristics provided by the manufacturer's data sheets. The developed quartz tungsten halogen lamp-based solar cell simulator can therefore be used to characterize solar cells.

The Effect of Variation in Mass Flow Rate and Solar Irradiance on Temperature Uniformity and Thermal Performance of Photovoltaic Thermal: A Simulated CFD Study

“…PVT system achieves this by extracting the heat from the PV panel into a working fluid flowing through an absorber. PVT systems can have different types of absorber or collector configurations such as parabolic trough, parabolic dish, linear Fresnel and flat plate collectors (FPC) [14][15][16]. The most common of these is the FPC configuration which is the configuration addressed in this study.…”

Arduino Uno Wi-Fi DeMilitarized Zone-based monitoring of solar photovoltaic systems

“…Meanwhile, Solar cells equipped with batteries and power management systems were used to provide electricity for disaster monitoring systems, for structure health monitoring, for aquaculture monitoring and underground mining area monitoring. 1 Such systems were placed in remote and inaccessible areas and therefore monitoring such solar cells and batteries becomes important to ensure the continuous power supply to the monitoring systems.…”

Design and Implementation of LED Solar Simulator

“…The solar simulator is a controllable indoor test facility offering laboratory conditions used to measure the functioning of solar cells, PV modules, and other devices and substances which are delicate to sunlight. The solar simulator is formed from light sources which used to simulate the spectrum of the sun and linked to the power supply to operate the system, optics and filters used to amendment the output rays of the light source to provide the required irradiance, and control system to work the solar simulator [5][6].…”

“…There are several common light sources which used in the solar simulator to test solar cells and modules such as carbon arc lamps, quartz-tungsten halogen lamps, mercury xenon lamps, xenon arc lamps, metal halide lamps, and LED lamps. Xenon arc lamps are the most widely used as a light source in solar simulators, while metal halide arc lamps, carbon arc lamps, and quartz tungsten halogen lamps are also selected as the light source in particular types of solar simulator designs [2], [5], [7]. Recently, more research done using LED as a light source due to their advantages compared with traditional light sources such as its lower cost, more compact, less power consumption and so on [2][3][4][5], [8][9][10].…”