A novel temperature estimation method for solar cells

In this paper, an effective approach for estimating the operating temperature of a photovoltaic (PV) module is presented. The developed method is simple and does not need any additional hardware. The proposed approach uses an analytical formula to derive the temperature from the maximum power point (MPP) voltage and current. The effectiveness of the new method is investigated through some conducted simulations in MATLAB/Simulink environment and its validity is verified by experiment on REC-AE220 solar modules.