Abstract: Energy from the sun is the best option for electricity generation as it is abundantly available everywhere and sustainable source. Advance of Photovoltaic (PV) technology in recent years has made solar energy one of the practical alternative energy sources available in the energy market. In order to make the PV energy more affordable and cost effective, major focus of the research community and industry is improvement on power efficiency of PV systems. Parameter extraction of solar cell plays a crucial role in the simulation and design calculation of PV system. In this paper, in order to fast and accurately extract the solar cell parameters, differential evolution (DE) is proposed. The single diode and double diode model of solar cell is used as the basis for the extraction problem. The analysis carried out using current-voltage (I-V) characteristics showed that the proposed DE outperforms other methods, namely the genetic algorithm (GA) and partical swarm optimization (PSO).

Keywords: Solar cell models, parameter extraction, Differential evolution, Genetic algorithm, Particle swarm optimization.