Performance Investigation of Monocrystalline and Polycrystalline PV Modules under Real Conditions

Crystalline silicon PV module dominates PV technology worldwide and are constantly emerging with innovative PV designs. Passivated Emitter and Rear Cell PV technology (PERC) is one such high efficiency crystalline PV design that is dominating almost 60% market share. The present study intends to fill the gap by comparing the experimental behavior of high efficiency Mono and Polycrystalline PERC PV Module under realistic conditions. Outdoor installed PV modules are severely impacted by partial shading that results in decline in energy efficiency and develop multiple power peaks in the I-V characteristics. Innovative MPPT techniques are frequently researched to mitigate this problem. However, these techniques do not consider the increase of temperature developed in the shaded cells which may cause critical degradations in the entire module. In this regard, the experimental work presented aim to investigate the shaded percentage that could build hotspots in shaded cells of temperature of approximately twice the unshaded cells of the modules. In our study single cell shading percentage of 60% in monocrystalline (hotspot temperature of 90.1°C) and single cell shading percentage of 40% (hotspot temperature of 92.3°C) in polycrystalline triggered the hotspot in the modules. This research work concludes that the power losses, efficiency loss are recorded more in Polycrystalline PV module in comparison with Monocrystalline PV module. It may be concluded from results that polycrystalline PV module is vulnerable to develop hotspots at faster rate with lesser shaded area than monocrystalline PV module This study helps to analyse the thermal degradations in commercial new designs of crystalline PV technologies and may be used by researchers to build up better design which could be used to minimize hotspot issues.