A new technique for extracting physical parameters of a solar cell model from the double exponential model (DECM)

•We propose and apply a new technique for extracting physical parameters.•We tested the efficiency of this proposed extracting method by generating.•The parameter values found by extraction using this technique are comparable.•This result highlights the importance of this extraction technique.

In this paper, we propose and apply a new technique for extracting physical parameters of solar cell double exponential model with two ideality factor constants (DECM) from illuminated current–voltage (I–V) experimental characteristics. The equivalent circuit of solar cell includes two constant diodes ideality factors (n1 = 1, n2 = 2) with two saturation currents I0D and I0R, a current generator intensity Iph, a series resistor RS and a conductance GP. A set of current–voltage characteristics are generated by injecting various RS values in the characteristic equation. Using the area error rate (“%ΔArea,”) between the experimental and extracted (I–V) characteristics, the value of RS is deduced as the minimum of this error. The obtained results show a good agreement with the experimental characteristics measured on a commercial polycrystalline solar cell.