Shunt and series resistance, photo- and saturation current, and ideality factor extraction of photovoltaic devices, integrating the current minus the short circuit current, using the 3/8 rule, with an automatic executable program

Abstract A C++-based automatic executable program is implemented and provided in this article to integrate the current minus the short-circuit current, using the 3/8 integration rule, to compute the Co-Content function. The shunt ( Rsh ) and series resistance ( Rs ), photo ( Iph ) and saturation current ( Isat ), and ideality factor ( n ) (within the one-diode solar cell model) are then automatically calculated by the program, together with their standard deviations. When it is applied to simulated current voltage ( IV ) curves, the five solar cell parameters are extracted with less than 1% error, using only 26 points and in less than 1 s, in the case of noiseless IV curves, while in the case of 0.1% noise of the maximum current, less than 1% error is achieved with 51 points, and also in less than 1 s. The program is applied to measured IV curves in a commercial solar cell, and compared with the usual trapezoidal integration method and another method. All the solar cell parameters are reasonably extracted in under one second, whereas other techniques require at least 7 min.