Computer-Aided Modelling and Analysis of PV Systems: A Comparative Study

Modern scientific advances have enabled remarkable efficacy for photovoltaic systems with regard to the exploitation of solar energy, boosting them into having a rapidly growing position among the systems developed for the production of renewable energy. However, in many cases the design, analysis, and control of photovoltaic systems are tasks which are quite complex and thus difficult to be carried out. In order to cope with this kind of problems, appropriate software tools have been developed either as standalone products or parts of general purpose software platforms used to model and simulate the generation, transmission, and distribution of solar energy. The utilization of this kind of software tools may be extremely helpful to the successful performance evaluation of energy systems with maximum accuracy and minimum cost in time and effort. The work presented in this paper aims on a first level at the performance analysis of various configurations of photovoltaic systems through computer-aided modelling. On a second level, it provides a comparative evaluation of the credibility of two of the most advanced graphical programming environments, namely, Simulink and LabVIEW, with regard to their application in photovoltaic systems.