simulator for this modelling because of its world wide use in electric and electronic circuit simulation and its ... problems of design, sizing or analysis. 'PSpice is the popular standard for analog and ... with Orcad Capture, Concept HDL or Pspice.
REVIEW
Modelling photovoltaic systems ‘Photovoltaic system engineering and system design is often treated only superficially in existing books on photovoltaics,’ writes Professor Martin Green of the Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering at the University of New South Wales, who provides the forward to ‘Modelling photovoltaic systems using PSpice’ by Luis Castañer and Santiago Silvestre. ‘This book appears to be the first including computer modelling of photovoltaic systems with a detailed and quantitative analysis,’ notes Green, adding that ‘Pspice is a good choice of simulator for this modelling because of its world wide use in electric and electronic circuit simulation and its widespread availability. It can be used synergistically to learn about photovoltaic systems or to solve technical problems of design, sizing or analysis. ‘PSpice is the popular standard for analog and mixed signal simulation. Engineers, universities and semiconductor manufacturers work with and also provide PSpice models for new devices. It is a powerful and robust tool and also works with Orcad Capture, Concept HDL or Pspice schematics in an integrated environment.’
PSpice history Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (Spice) was developed in the early ‘70’s at the University of California at Berkeley, written originally in Fortran and designed for mainframes. It has gone through several iterations, and is public domain software. Examples of commercial Spice software include Hspice, AllSpice, and PSpice. All of the Spice programs have kept the same syntax and algorithms and been widely accepted by the VLSI industry as the standard for device level circuit simulation. By the mid-1980s, Spice was adapted. It is now commercially available for PC, Macintosh, and SUN, as well as larger-scale systems. Pspice, developed by California MicroSim was the first commercial PC-based Spice program to gain acceptance from industry and academia. It was adopted by design giant Cadence, working with Orcad Capture, Concept HDL or PSpice schematics for engineers to create design, set up and run simulation and analyse their results. Free PSpice 9.1 student version can be downloaded and a free Orcad Lite edition is also available. ‘PV engineering is a multidisciplinary speciality, deeply rooted in semiconductor 10
Photovoltaics Bulletin
physics for solar cell theory and technology, and heavily relying on electrical and electronic engineering for system design and analysis,’ write the authors. ‘Computer aided technical work is of great help, because most of the system components are described by nonlinear equations, and the node circuit equations that have to be solved to find the values of the currents and voltages, most often do not have analytical solutions. Moreover the characteristics of solar cells and PV generators strongly depend on the intensity of the solar radiation and on the ambient temperature. As these are variable magnitudes with time, the system design stage will be more accurate if an estimation of the performance of the system in a long-term scenario with realistic time series of radiation and temperature is carried out.’
‘Confidence in validity’ Castañer and Silvestre specially acknowledge the work of Raimond Aloy, supervised by Daniel Carles, who ‘did wonderful, systematic and comprehensive work, principally in battery modelling.’ The work was continued by Andreu Moreno and Javier Julve who developed long term simulations with the monitoring results in the experimental University PV installation. This helped to create confidence in the validity of the models and on the utility of the PSpice environment and stimulated writing the book. After introducing PV systems and PSpice, the book tackles spectral response and short circuit current; electrical characteristics of the solar cell; arrays, PV modules and PV generators; interfacing PV modules to load and battery modelling; power conditioning and inverter modelling; stand alone and grid connected PV systems and small photovoltaics.
His early research work was on lifetime degradation space effects on silicon and GaAs cells and solar cell modelling, becoming involved in the development of a solar cells industrial technology process for a semiconductor company in Barcelona in the 1970s. He did research work on CIS solar cells in the 1980s using flash evaporation, co-authoring the first measurement of carrier lifetime in sputtered CuInSe2/CdS. In the late 1980s and early 1990s he contributed to the study of the emitter resistance of polysilicon emitter bipolar transistors using this to fabricate polysilicon emitter solar cells. He also became involved in PV system design, analysis and monitoring, publishing several papers on Pspice modelling of PV systems. Recently he has worked on MEMS and contributed to MCM and the monolithic assembly of small PV arrays. Dr Santiago Silvestre joined the semiconductor devices group of the Electronics Engineering Department at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (U.P.C.) in 1992, where he worked on R&D of solar cells and PV systems. He is currently Associate Professor of Telecoms and Electronics engineering at the Telecommunications Engineering School of Barcelona. He did research work on solar cell design and characterisation techniques, modelling and simulation of photovoltaic devices and systems, low power PV applications and fault diagnostic of PV systems. He has lectured on photovoltaics since 1995. ‘Modelling photovoltaic systems using PSpice’ by Luis Castañer & Santiago Silvestre. Published by John Wiley & Sons. 358pp. Price: 115.50. For more information contact: Pspice Web: http://www.pspice.com/ or http://www.esf.upc.es/esf
The authors Prof Luis Castañer has contributed to the research and education of solar cells and photovoltaic systems since 1973 and is one of the early introducers of photovoltaics to Spain.
Luis Castañer
Santiago Silvestre
January 2003
