An improved method to estimate the parameters of the single diode model of photovoltaic module using differential evolution

This paper proposes an improved computational method to estimate the parameters of the single diode RP model for PV modules. The approach utilized the Differential Evolution (DE) algorithm to accurately determine the values of the photocurrent (I _PV ), saturation current (I _o ), ideality factor (a), series resistance (R _s ) and the shunt resistance (R _p ). In addition, the model performance is enhanced by utilizing DE only to solve for a and R _s ; other parameters, i.e I _PV , I _o and R _p are analytically computed. By this way, the computational burden is reduced and the speed of convergence is increased significantly. It was found that the proposed method yields better results, particularly at low irradiance levels. In addition, substantial improvement in accuracy can also be seen around the knee of the I-V characteristic curve.