Photovoltaic modules operating temperature estimation using a simple correlation

Abstract

The operating cell temperatures of photovoltaic (PV) modules directly affect the performance of the PV system. In this study, an effective new approach for estimating the operating temperature of a photovoltaic module is presented. The developed model is simple and does not need any complicated calculations. The proposed approach uses a simple formula to derive the PV cell temperature from the environmental variables such as ambient temperature, irradiance and wind speed. Effectiveness of the new temperature estimation procedure is investigated through some conducted simulations in MATLAB/Simulink environment and its validity is verified by experiment on a UNI-SOLAR US-64 solar photovoltaic modules. It was found that, in general, the model tends to give better results of temperature prediction. From the results, the predicted PV cell temperatures show a good correlation with the measured data. The MBE, NMBE, RMSE, NRMSE and correlation coefficient of predicted and measured PV cell temperatures are -0.3490 oC,-0.7328%, 1.3571 oC, 2.8492% and 0.9763, respectively. The statistical results show that the model can be used to predict the PV cell temperatures with an error of less than 3%. As a conclusion, the PV cell temperatures can be estimated using a new linear model based on the steady state approach prediction as Tmod uleo C 0.943 Tambient  0.0195 Irradiance  1.528WindSpeed  0.3529 .