This paper presents a novel photo-electro-thermal (PET) model that completely describes the photonic, electrical, and thermal interaction for commercial photovoltaic (PV) modules. With the PET model, PV cell temperature can be directly obtained by an analytical solution and further combined with PV electricity model. Simply based on both thermal and electrical characteristics of commercial PV modules available from the manufacturer datasheet, the integrated PV electricity and PET model for commercial PV modules is implemented in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. Both cell temperatures and electrical characteristics of a commercially available PV module are evaluated through in-the-field experiments where not only weather conditions but PV operating parameters can be acquired by a LabVIEW-based measurement system. Comparing to the experimental results, the combined PV electricity and PET model is validated and the results reveal a close agreement between simulation and measurement. This work features the analytical solution of the PET model considers the time-lagged effect on PV cell temperature by PV thermal mass without complex computation of a first-order differential equation for the thermodynamics method.

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