Introducing Suns-VR as an enhancement to Suns-VOC for Characterizing Photovoltaic Cells and Modules

摘要

Suns-VOC has been used extensively to characterize silicon photovoltaics at the cell and system level but does not measure power or current. The addition of a single load resistor, a simple adaptation to Suns-VOC, which we denote as Suns-VR, enables the measurement of the module power and the short circuit current. We demonstrate that by using a single load resistor, we can gather an accurate determination of the efficiency, maximum power, and short circuit current of a solar module by varying the illumination. Combining the Suns-VR and the Suns-VOC allows for a full characterization of solar cells and modules including the parameters of VOC, ISC, FF, PMAX, RSERIES, RSHUNT and ideality factor with applications in both indoor and outdoor testing. This manuscript demonstrates the accuracy of using Suns-VR indoors on a 8-cell module.