The Photovoltaic (PV) Module Performance Analysis using Artificial Neural Network (ANN)

Energy sources are very important for the development of a country. Due to global warming and other environmental effects there is an urgent need for clean energy. The study and research on solar photovoltaic systems is increasing to get the electricity on the electric power grid as well as on local domestic load level. This technology development nowadays focuses on the improvement related to the enhancement in the performance of these solar PV modules with factors dependent on the conditions at the installation sites. The present work is based on the experimentation that is conducted on a laboratory set made as per the hot and dry climate zone of India. Its experimental set up consists of two solar cell array PV modules with similar electrical and mechanical parameters under the experimental sets. Work is focused on the analysis of the real time performance records and measurements by high quality standard instruments at the time zone of different months in the year without and with the presence of effect of cooling due to artificial wind. The experimental observation describes that due to increase in the module temperature because of heating by solar irradiance degrades the performance of the solar PV module in terms of net energy output but by the inclusion of the controlled artificial wind based cooling mechanism helps in supporting the process of bringing down the solar cell PV module temperature as a result the gain of a net energy is increased for similar time constraints and irradiance. Performance measure ratio is also consequently observed to be improved. Finally the experimental and simulated energy by the artificial neural network (ANN) is observed for both of the wind cooled module and without the wind cooled module experimental and simulated energy. ANN based simulated model related estimated values of energy is observed to be closer to experimental values for both modules. ANN is helpful in finding the accurate estimation of the performance ration of solar as that of experimental results.