Investigation of PV Modules Electrical Characteristics for Laboratory Experiments using Halogen Solar Simulator

The electrical characteristics of the photovoltaic (PV) module degrades due to several factors such as non-uniform aging, high atmospheric temperature, insufficient sun lights, shading, dust, soiling, cell damage, etc. In order to investigate the electrical performance of PV modules at such conditions, indoor solar simulators are commonly used for experimental research. In this work, a solar simulator is developed for a university lab to test the electrical characteristics of PV modules and array for low-cost experimental purposes. A microcontroller-based current-voltage (I-V) tracer with a real-time data logger system is used to maintain the reliability of the measuring system. The experimental investigation of the halogen-based solar simulator is carried out using both polycrystalline and monocrystalline PV panels of different power ratings. A prototype (5×8) PV array with 40 PV cells is tested by the solar simulator at a different level of irradiance. The experimental result shows that the average measurement error is ±0.022% which is within the acceptable range of a commercial simulator.