Estimation of single-diode and two diode solar cell parameters by equilibrium optimizer method

One of the difficulties encountered in the designing of solar photovoltaic systems is to find a model that accurately reproduces the behaviour of the system under various production conditions. The accuracy of this model depends on the identified parameters which are mainly based on the optimization technique performed and the objective function employed. The algorithm used here is the equilibrium optimizer. This one allows to identify the decision variables of the one and two diodes models of the RTC France solar cell which will allow us to minimize the objective function. The optimization strategy used here is based on the experimental data which are measured under a known temperature and irradiation level. The root mean square error between the measured and estimated current data sets, which is widely used in the literature, is adapted to evaluate the effectiveness of the method. The results obtained by calculating the mean square error by the equilibrium optimizer method for each model, are then compared with those obtained by methods identified in the literature under the similar conditions. It is found that the presented method presents results that are the closest to the real behaviour of a photovoltaic solar cell. It presents a result that minimizes the objective function enormously. Thus, we evaluate for the model with one diode the mean square error to 9.8604E−4 and 9.83532E−4 for the model with two diodes. This method reproduces better the behaviour of a photovoltaic solar cell than other methods listed in the literature. Moreover it presents a fast convergence towards the optimal solution. This allows us to validate the algorithms presented here to estimate the parameters of a photovoltaic solar cell.