This paper presents a combined electro-thermal model to serve the aim of accurate
output power prediction of photovoltaic systems, based on the concept of the thermal
energy balance. The electrical sub-model is built based on fitting a surface to the
current-voltage curves collected under wide range temperatures and irradiances. For
this purpose, the current-voltage characteristic curves are reproduced using two different
methods. The thermal sub-model considers all the effective heat transfer mechanisms
to estimate the photovoltaic module junction temperature. The Newton-Raphson iterative
method is used as a solving algorithm to calculate the photovoltaic junction temperature.
The collected results prove the applicability of the model under a wide range of environmental
conditions.
