Toolkit for I-V Characterization of Photovoltaic Cells

This toolkit is part of the article on photovoltaic cell I-V characterization theory: Part II – Photovoltaic Cell I-V Characterization Theory and LabVIEW Analysis Code The other two articles in this series are:

• Part I – Photovoltaic Cell Overview
• Part III – I-V Characterization of Photovoltaic Cells using PXI

Toolkit for I-V Analysis with LabVIEW

Using LabVIEW analysis capabilities you can assess the main performance parameters for photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules.  In order to facilitate the I-V analysis, National Instruments has created a hardware-independent LabVIEW toolkit to perform the I-V characterization analysis. Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the toolkit’s main VI.

Figure 1 - LabVIEW VI for Solar Cell Characterization

The code consists of three parts: the code that controls the PXI-4130, data that has been collected; not on standard condition, from a poly-crystal solar module for simulation purposes, and the code for analysis. To use the toolkit you have two options you can either open the project and run the simulated examples or you can build your code from scratch using the I-V modeling functions.

Some consideration to take into account are that the code was develop in LabVIEW 8.5 and that you will need to have the math analysis menu on your “functions palette”, since some of the calculation use the “Linear Fit.vi”.

Figure 2 - LabVIEW VI for Solar Cell Characterization

The downloadable toolkit contains two sets of code for I-V characterization from forward-bias tests:

• One set to read and analyze data that was previously acquired and saved in LVM format 
• The second set can be run with National Instruments hardware, as described in Part III of this series.  It acquires, analyzes, and presents the results of the I-V characterization.

 

Requirements

Filename: solarcelltestingcode.zip

Software Requirements

Language(s): LabVIEW

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