2017 7th International Conference on Power Systems (ICPS)

College of Engineering Pune, India. Dec 21-23, 2017

Modeling of Solar Photovoltaic module using

system identification
Rohan S. Kulkarni  Dhananjay%7DODQJH
Research Scholar, Dept. of Electrical Engg.,
Govt. College of Engg.,Pune (India). Govt. College of Engg.,Pune (India)
Email: rohaneln@gmail.com Email: talanged@gmail.com

Abstract—For gaining clean and free energy from the sun, model of the energy utilization, since only predicted solar
solar photovoltaic (PV) systems are used. The main input to insolation is available for present control decisions [3].
PV system is solar insolation which is uncontrollable variable. In this paper, the system identification technique is used
To optimize the energy gain from this system good models of
system dynamics are required. System identification methods are to model solar PV panel output. The data refer to a PV
often either highly specialized for the application or require system located in Mediterranean Climate. They consist of the
an extensive amount of data, especially when the dynamics meteorological data as hourly mean ambient temperature (
studied are nonlinear. This paper shows that by application of Ta ), hourly mean module temperature, hourly mean solar
system identification technique, a solar PV module system can be irradiance measured on 3 deg. tilted planes (I3 ) and the hourly
modeled with very good accuracy, without modifying the model
structure. mean PV power for a period of 21 months [4].
Index Terms—System identification, Transfer function, Solar
photovoltaic A. PV system Description
The description of PV modules system consider for this
I. I NTRODUCTION study is mentioned in following tables.
Primary energy source the sun provides light and heat to
the earth. This environment friendly source do not leaves TABLE I
T ECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PV SYSTEM [5]
any waste product. It is available in huge amount than our
PV system Specification
demands. As compared to the use of fossil fuels, the long Nominal power of PV system 353.3 kWp
term advantages appear to be vast. The main questions with Azimuth angle −10
solar energy are, how to utilize, store, and distribute it. Solar Tilt angle 3
Total number of modules 1104
PV panels and solar thermal water are the most common ways
Net modules’ surface area 1733.3m2
to harvest solar energy.
Nonlinearities are not uncommon in solar energy appli- TABLE II
cations, which poses a problem in modeling and control of TECHNICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE PV MODULE [5]
solar PV panel. Good control strategies are crucial to obtain PV module Specification
efficient utilization of the solar energy. The performance of Type Mono-crystalline silicon
the solar PV module is majorally impacted by changes in Nominal power 320Wp
Maximum power voltage 54.70 V
module temperature (Tm ) and solar radiation (I). Increase Maximum power current 5.86 A
of module temperature reduces the efficiency of the module. Open circuit voltage 64.8 V
Solar module’s open circuit voltage (VOC ) is sensitive to Short circuit current 6.24 A
Gross module surface area 1.63m2
temperature whereas short circuit current (Isc ) is not. The cell Net module surface area 1.57m2
voltage and temperature are inversely related which can be
shown from simple calculation. The output of solar PV panel
is directly proportional to incident solar radiation which is
highly nonlinear in nature [1] [2].
With accurate models of the solar electrification process
II. M ODELING AND SYSTEM IDENTIFICATION PROCEDURE
available, controller design can be facilitated, and the energy
gain from the module improved. However, if the accuracy of The modeling process varies from system to system. De-
the model is obtained at the cost of high complexity and many pending on the a priori knowledge of the system structure three
model parameters, the controller design may be complicated. different classes of models of the system can be produced as
The ideal would be a simple model structure that gives a high listed below [6] [7].
accuracy. Such a model could be used for various applications, • White Box : For this type of model the structure and
like fault detection and weather forecast based control. Note parameters can be find out from physical principles and
that weather forecast based control would rely on a dynamic information is available a priori. The identification of

978-1-5386-1789-2/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE 782

 such a system does not require experimental data and if the initial guess is poor. If the data set would have been
can be characterized based on first engineering principles larger the multiple scans would be superfluous. Note that
[8]. multiple scans are only believed to be required during initial
• Gray Box : For this class of models the structure is convergence.
usually known and in most cases certain physical param-
eters need to be determined from measured data. The A. Identification results
amount of information known a priori in these models Identification experiments with the solar heating system
usually varies from case to case but the system structure data have been performed using the transfer function model
will not be replaced by artificial structures as seen in mentioned in eq. (1) and (2). The experiments were of black-
generic black-box approximations. Grey box design needs box type, where no prior knowledge of the system was
both modeling and identification, since the result obtained assumed to be available. The transfer functions for different
from modeling is not certain and must be verified by input parameters given in equation (3) and (4).
identification [8].
• Black Box : This usually uses nonlinear neural network P (s) a1s2 − a2s − a3
modeling (NN). The model complexity is determined = (3)
Tm (s) s4 + b1s3 + b2s2 + b3s + b4
from a generalized NN model. The identification in such P (s) c1s2 + c2s + c3
a case is performed exclusively from measured data. With = (4)
I3 (s) d1s2 + d2s + d3
this type of model structural information is usually lost
[8]. In the above equations a1.., b1.., c1.., d1 are the constant
From above mentioned modeling techniques, black box mod- coefficients. The above equations’s order suggests that rela-
eling is used to model solar PV modules. From the given tionship between Tm and output power is more complex than
data in [4], solar irradiance at 3o tilted plane (I3 ) and module relation between solar radiation and output power.
temperature consider as system input parameters and solar Examples of simulations with models obtained in the ex-
module’s power (P) will be the output of this system. We have periments are shown in Fig. 1 and 2. We have used small data
used different dataset for training and validation process. The set (100 samples each) to validate our model.
identification was performed with transfer function methodol-
ogy.
P (s)
Y1 (s) = (1)
Tm (s)
P (s)
Y2 (s) = (2)
I3 (s)
Equation (1) and (2) represents the transfer functions for
different input parameters. We have considered 2 inputs for our
system so that we have written 2 transfer function considering
each input separately.
III. I DENTIFICATION EXPERIMENTS
As mentioned previous section, the data from the solar PV Fig. 1. Measured (red) and simulated (green) output power for the full black
box model(data set 1)
system consists of two inputs and an output. The solar inso-
lation u1 varies over the day, and during the night there are,
naturally, long periods of no solar radiation. This introduces
some difficulties, since there is no excitation of u1 during
this time. The second input u2 corresponds to the module
temperature which is function of ambient temperature, solar
radiation and load current [3] [9].
To be able to compare model performances the data set
was split in two, one subset for calibration of the transfer
functions and a second for validation of the calibrated model.
The calibration set consists of the first half of the samples
and the validation data of the second half. A small data set is
used with the multiple scans The data set used for calibration
only contains 100 samples. From a modeling perspective this
is a small data set, especially when considering that the
Fig. 2. Measured (red) and simulated (green) output power for the full black
identification method is of black-box type. An acceptable box model(data set 2)
model could be obtained from a small amount of data even

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 The above results shows that it is possible to model the solar
PV array system with a black-box identification method, and
a small number of data points. The parameters can be made to
converge using as little as 100 samples by applying multiple
scans. Excluding some of the parameters may improve the
model performance while the structure becomes less complex,
and thus even more suitable for controller design.
IV. C ONCLUSION
The identification experiments performed in this paper show
that the dynamics of a solar PV array system can be identified
with a black-box model. A efficient utilization of the solar
energy can be achieved using a simple transfer function model
which helps to design an improved controller. Such improved
control methods would improve the economic benefits of
solar PV systems, thereby contributing to an extended use of
environmentally friendly energy sources.
Interesting topics for further research could be to study
optimal controller design, possibly based on weather forecasts.
Model based fault detection would also be of interest. The
model could also be extended to including energy consump-
tion.
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