A Critical Review on the Estimation Techniques of the Solar PV Cell’s Unknown Parameters

To meet the exponentially growing demand for clean and green energy, the solar photovoltaic (PV) system’s importance is increasing day by day, for which PV modeling is considered to be one of the most important work in the current state-of-the-art methods. To effectively model a PV system, accurate PV parameter estimation is of the utmost importance. In line with this, although the values of some of the parameters are provided in the manufacturer’s datasheet, the values of unknown parameters, such as shunt resistance, series resistance, the diode ideality factor, photo-generated current and diode saturation current, are not provided. To estimate these values a lot of algorithms are already reported in the literature. After careful observation of all the reported algorithms, a few best-reported algorithms are identified and their performances are compared with respect to accuracy, convergence issues, computational complexity and thermal stability. All kind of algorithms, such as numerical, analytical and evolutionary algorithms, are considered in this study, and only the best reported algorithms are considered for the comparison.