Modeling and Detection of Hotspot in Shaded Photovoltaic Cells

Daniele Rossi, Martin Omana, Daniele Giaffreda, Cecilia Metra

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

    46 Citations (Scopus)
    19 Downloads (Pure)

    Abstract

    In this paper, we address the problem of modeling the thermal behavior of photovoltaic (PV) cells undergoing a hotspot condition. In case of shading, PV cells may experience a dramatic temperature increase, with consequent reduction of the provided power. Our model has been validated against experimental data, and has highlighted a counterintuitive PV cell behavior, that should be considered to improve the energy efficiency of PV arrays. Then, we propose a hotspot detection scheme, enabling to identify the PV module that is under hotspot condition. Such a scheme can be used to avoid the permanent damage of the cells under hotspot, thus their drawback on the power efficiency of the entire PV system.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)1031 - 1039
    Number of pages9
    JournalIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
    Volume23
    Issue number6
    Early online date18 Jul 2014
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2015

    Keywords

    • Energy efficiency
    • hotspot
    • photovoltaic (PV) systems
    • reliability
    • Maximum power point trackers
    • Heating

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