Abstract—There are two methods to measurement of the characteristic of a solar cell which include: dark and light I-V characteristic measurement. The light I-V measurement method can be used for either natural Sun or a Sun simulator as the light source. This article presents the development method of electrical parameters measurement of the solar cell by using a simple resistive load with light I-V measurement. The solar cell was tested under standard testing condition with a solar simulator. This was done in order to plot the current and voltage characteristic of the solar cell. The author developed the measurement and monitoring program by using LabVIEW environment. The voltage-divider technique was used for the solar cell voltage measurement, and the hall-effect current sensor was applied for the current measurement. A variable resistive load was applied by a manual control. The solar cell specimen is a mono-crystalline 1 W 7.5 V. The results found that this method is simple and beneficial for the study of the current-voltage characteristic and exhibited positive performance of the solar cell with a good accuracy. The measurement system is not complicated and is compatible for interfacing devices. The graphical user interface software could display all of electrical parameters. Moreover, it can plot the I-V curve and P-V curves of solar cell under testing conditions. As for future work, the author has to develop an electronics load to replace a resistive load in order to complete the current-voltage characteristic curves with a computer control.

Index Terms—Graphical user interface, I-V characteristic, solar cell, LabVIEW.

Napat Watjanatepin and Paiboon Kiatsookkanatorn are with Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, Rajamangala University of Technology Suvarnabhumi, 7/1 Nonthaburi.1 Nonthaburi, Thailand.

Cite:Napat Watjanatepin, Paiboon Kiatsookkanatorn, "The Measurement of Electrical Parameters for a Solar Cell I-V Characteristic Curve by Using Simple Resistive Load Based on LabVIEW," International Journal of Computer and Electrical Engineering vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 205-212, 2018.