Simulation and design of a photovoltaic roof for automotive applications

This paper presents a software tool that has been developed to model, investigate and simulate the behavior of a photovoltaic generator to be installed on a generic non-planar surface. The innovative aspect of the tool is the possibility to consider any kind of surfaces, also curved and moving ones. The tool has been developed in the Matlab environment and allows the user to analyze any kind of surface simply starting from a CAD file. The tool is very versatile and can be used to analyze the possibility to exploit various available surfaces in order to produce photovoltaic energy in many different applications. As a practical example, the case of using solar cells on the roof of a car has been considered. Results of the simulations are provided in the paper. © 2012 IEEE.