An Analytical Effective-Diode-Based Analysis of Industrial Solar Cells From Three-Diode Lumped-Parameter Model

Three-diode lumped-parameter equivalent circuit model conforms to photovoltaic device physics and processes an exact analysis for I- V characteristics of industrial solar cells, because it explains the different leakage current components especially for recombination current resulting from defects or grain boundaries. However, three-diode model's complete circuit topology leads to complicated transcendental I- V equation without analytical solution so that low computation efficiency limits three-diode model's applications in photoelectric simulations. In this article, an effective-diode method is proposed to simplify three-diode model, derive accurate and efficient terminal current-voltage solution to three-diode model, and acquire electrostatic characteristics of the solar cells. The calculated values have good agreements with numerical iteration results and experimental data measured from solar cells, respectively. Finally, the effective-diode method performs an important role of solving three-diode model analytically, predicting I- V characteristics of industrial solar cells accurately, and providing three-diode model's practicability and development in solar cells' simulations.