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

Suns-V
_OC
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-V
_OC
, 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-V
_OC
allows for a full characterization of solar cells and modules including the parameters of V
_OC
, I
_SC
, FF, P
_MAX
, R
_SERIES
, R
_SHUNT
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.