Reliability analysis and design of a single diode solar cell model using polynomial chaos and active subspace

Abstract

In recent times, photovoltaic power systems are being used worldwide with a high rate of adoption as a source of clean energy. It is therefore important to study the impact of environmental uncertainties on the yielding power of these solar cells. This paper considers the problem of reliability analysis/design for the yield power in a single diode solar cell when there are uncertainties in the outdoor conditions (e.g. temperature, irradiance) with polynomial chaos and active subspace methods. With the polynomial chaos based surrogate modeling of the yield power, one can accurately and efficiently compute the mean and variance of the yielding power. Following this, reliability design is formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem involving (A) maximization of the mean power yield and (B) minimization of the power yield variation under temperature and irradiance uncertainties. The active subspace method is used to simplify the bi-objective formulation. It is found that utilizing the active subspace method can simplify the bi-objective nonlinear design problem to a bi-objective linear optimization one. Our simulation result shows that the bi-objective linear optimization problem results in a higher mean and lower variance in the maximum power point (MPP) than the direct non-linear design approach.