Determination of individual concentrator tolerances from full-array I-V curve measurements

Abstract

When dealing with CPV manufacturing process, tolerances are critical in order to obtain a low cost massproduction system. Usually the efficiency attained by a whole module array is smaller than the average efficiency of every single module. This downside is due to the well-known mismatch losses introduced by the cell series connection. For this reason, we present a novel mathematical method to calculate photocurrent versus pointing angle curves for the single-cell modules, with the only information of photocurrent versus pointing angle measurements for the whole module array. In this way we can estimate the mismatch losses for a given array just by analyzing its full-array I-V curve. Thus, the great breakthrough about this method lies in no single-cell module measurement is needed. The application of this method allows the measurement of the real tolerances of any CPV system.