Mathematical Model and Software to Optimize Power of Organic Photovoltaic (OPV) Cells for Several Panel Set-Ups

In this work, we propose a mathematical model to simulate electrical parameters of variable-size solar cell panels. We have implemented the proposed model in Matlab to compare the output power of different panel configurations with the same number of cells. The main objectives of this research are to find the optimum configuration of OPV cells in order to maximize the power conversion efficiency of the panel and to install the proposed set-up in our collaborating company (BC Hydro) test facilities to compare its performance with that of their current silicon-based solar panels. Considering parameter variations of OPV cells due to manufacturing process and having this statistical analysis and model, we perform Monte Carlo simulations for several different panel sizes with the same number of cells. We have also conducted the same analysis for different OPV materials and we have compared their output power and overall performance. For different applications with different power requirements the proposed software can provide the optimum panel size and configuration for maximum power efficiency with minimum overhead. The proposed model and software show that the output power can highly depend on the panel configuration. It has been observed that for the studied test cases the panel output power degrades by increasing the number of cells in series. For all panel configurations, we used the same number of total OPV cells i.e. when we increase the number of cells in series we also decrease the number of cells in parallel.