Using CAD software to simulate PV energy yield: Predicting the charge yield of solar cells incorporated into a PV powered consumer product under 3D-irradiation conditions

We describe an innovative method to simulate the energy yield of photovoltaic (PV) cells under complex, three dimensional (3D) irradiation conditions by exploiting computer aided design (CAD) software functionality. This can significantly facilitate PV energy yield simulations, because CAD software offers powerful ray-tracing and rendering features of 3D objects and sceneries. The concept is demonstrated by simulating the charge yields of a product-integrated PV (PIPV) solar cell located in an indoor environment. To this end, indoor CAD sceneries are ray-traced to render grey-scale or red-green-blue (RGB) encoded images. PV power output is then determined by translating the CAD-rendered images back into numerical data of irradiation, distributed on a 2D PV surface having a pre-defined cell-interconnection scheme. Although the concept is a very promising one, further software development and research is required to increase computational performance at high accuracy levels whilst facilitating software use.