Regular Article

A multicriteria analysis of the potential degradations of a photovoltaic module to assess its robustness

¹ Université de Gafsa, TEMI, Faculté des Sciences, 2112 Gafsa, Tunisia
² Univ. Paris-Est Créteil, CERTES, 61 avenue du Général de Gaulle, 94010 Créteil, France
³ SMARTiLab, EMSI Rabat, avenue Oqba, angle rue Assouhaili, 10000 Rabat, Morocco

^* e-mail: pierre-olivier.logerais@u-pec.fr

Received: 1 March 2023
Received in final form: 4 June 2023
Accepted: 19 July 2023
Published online: 6 September 2023

Abstract

Photovoltaic (PV) modules in service undergo more or less severe degradation depending on their operating environments, ages and technologies. In this work, we investigated the coupled influence of the climatic conditions of operation and of the degree of deterioration of a PV module on its energy production. We considered four silicon PV modules characterized in standard test conditions. The PV conversion is modeled by a single diode model taking into account the presence of a fault. Matlab/Simulink software was used to calculate the energy supplied at a constant load for the PV module with and without defects. The ratio between the energy produced with fault and without fault allowed to quantify the percentage of loss. This loss was plotted according to the degrees of degradation of the short-circuit current I_sc, the open-circuit voltage V_oc, the series resistance R_s and the shunt resistance R_sh. It is shown that when irradiance is held constant, the energy loss is lower with increasing temperature for I_sc and R_sh, and vice versa for V_oc and R_s. While the temperature is kept constant, the energy loss is lower when the irradiance increases for I_sc and R_sh, and inversely for V_oc and R_s. A multicriteria analysis enabled to determine the most robust module among the four ones.