Hybrid TDPEEC/FDTD Method for Lightning Transient Analysis in Solar Panels

Solar energy is one of the clean renewable energy, which plays an important role in energy strategy. As the solar panels of photovoltaic system are installed on the outdoor roof or open area, lightning is an important threat to the safe and stable operation of photovoltaic power generation system. Because of mutual coupling among the fine-structure solar panel, the ground and the buried wire grid, special techniques are required to develop for simulating transients in the panels. In this paper, a hybrid time domain partial element equivalent circuit/finite difference time domain (TD-PEEC/FDTD) method was proposed to solve the electromagnetic coupling problem of the coexistence of electrically large targets and electrically small target. The FDTD method was suitable for modeling fields in inhomogeneous media, while the TD-PEEC method was efficient in modeling elaborate wires. By using the principle of equivalence, the algorithm and the target were parallelized in different regions, which can improve the efficiency of calculation to the greatest extent on the premise of ensuring the correctness and accuracy. Compared with the traditional FDTD method, the feasibility of the hybrid method was verified. Finally, the method was applied to the lightning transient analysis of the inclined photovoltaic panel in the process of indirect lightning stroke. (c) 2022 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC.