Influence of shunt resistance on the performance of solar photovoltaic cell

Connecting Photovoltaic (PV) cells to form an array can cause difficulties when the characteristics of the cells are not synchronized. Shunt Resistance (R
_SH
) plays an important role in the performance of a PV. The leakage current resistance absorbs more current, due to that the current flows through the load circuit is reduced significantly. Increased leakage current among neighboring cells vary with electrical parameters to diminish the power output of the array and lead to cell degradation through localized heating of individual cells. Such problems often arise in effect of leakage current resistance or parallel resistance of a photovoltaic cell. In this paper, influence of a cell shunt resistance in a general photovoltaic cell on the fill factor (FF) has been analyzed. Variation in shunt resistance considerably changes the output power. A MATLAB program has been developed to study the variation in current-voltage (I-V) curve of the PV cell on the effect of shunt resistance. The algorithm for comparing the design data and experimental values of fill factor has identified the best efficiency solar cell with the effect of shunt resistance. In the I-V Curve the voltage value has been increased from 0.1 to 1.2V against the changes of shunt resistance value from 1 to 10Ω. In the shunt resistance-fill factor curve, the value of fill factor increases from 0.3 to 0.8 against the changes of shunt resistance value from 1 to 10Ω.