A multicriteria analysis of the potential degradations of a photovoltaic module to assess its robustness

Photovoltaic (PV) modules in service undergo more or less severe degradation depending on their operating environments, ages and technologies. In this work, we investigated the coupled influence of the climatic conditions of operation and of the degree of deterioration of a PV module on its energy production. We considered four silicon PV modules characterized in standard test conditions. The PV conversion is modeled by a single diode model taking into account the presence of a fault. Matlab/Simulink software was used to calculate the energy supplied at a constant load for the PV module with and without defects. The ratio between the energy produced with fault and without fault allowed to quantify the percentage of loss. This loss was plotted according to the degrees of degradation of the short-circuit current I sc , the open-circuit voltage V oc , the series resistance R s and the shunt resistance R sh . It is shown that when irradiance is held constant, the energy loss is lower with increasing temperature for I sc and R sh , and vice versa for V oc and R s . While the temperature is kept constant, the energy loss is lower when the irradiance increases for I sc and R sh , and inversely for V oc and R s . A multicriteria analysis enabled to determine the most robust module among the four ones.