A gray box modeling of a photovoltaic cell under low illumination in materials handling application

This paper presents a gray box model of a photovoltaic (PV) cell working under low illuminance artificial indoor lighting conditions. A mathematical model of PV cells with single and two diode configuration is used. Additionally a platform for the measurement of the PV cells within the indoor environment is presented. An optimization problem is formulated to tune the internal parameters of the mathematical models according to the collected data from measurement platform. Fluorescent and halogen lights are used as two common indoor lighting sources. The fine-tuned mathematical model with calculated parameters is implied to evaluate the performance of the gray box model compared to the measured data. Finally, to avoid using multiple models for different environmental conditions, regression techniques are used to generalize the model only based on the irradiance.

I. Introduction

The rising energy requirement of the world and the exhausting fossil fuels have given rise to the use of renewable energy resources such as solar energy [1]. Energy from solar cells are utilized for small and medium power based applications, as well as uses for powering the satellites in space [2]. According to the current state, a considerable amount of research is pursued to harvest energy from PhotoVoltaic (PV) cells under the outdoor lighting conditions.