PV-Circuit-Model 0.5.0

PV Circuit model for cells, modules and components with additional tools for simulations and model fits to measurement data

📦 PV Circuit Model – Overview

Solar cells are often arranged in a hierarchical network of series and parallel connections. Here's is an example representation of a solar cell modeled using this structure:

To simulate the I–V curve of any photovoltaic (PV) system—whether it is a single cell or a utility-scale array consisting of over 100,000 cells—one simply adds the voltages of components connected in series and the currents of components connected in parallel. This direct hierarchical composition approach is orders of magnitude faster than SPICE-based simulations, which rely on iterative Newton solvers. Moreover, the performance gap grows rapidly as circuit size increases.

PV Circuit Model is a Python library that implements this approach, and we refer to this hierarchical I–V composition method as CurveStack. CurveStack includes several useful numerical tools, such as:

• Adaptive remeshing near a desired operating point (e.g., maximum power point)
• Computation of tight upper and lower bounds on the I–V curve
• High-precision error estimation of derived I–V parameters—often reaching 10 parts-per-million accuracy, even for very large systems

In addition to CurveStack, PV Circuit Model also provides tools to simulate and analyze standard PV measurements (e.g., I–V curves, Suns-Voc), along with workflows for fitting circuit models to experimental data. It also provides built-in functionalities like the dark current due to intrinsic silicon recombination, and luminescence coupling in tandem cells, which make it convenient to do various calculations related to solar cells.

🛠️ Getting Started

1. Install the package in development mode: pip install -e .

2. Run example code You can test the package functionality by executing the example script inside the examples/ directory:

⚙️ Platform Support & Build Requirements

Current Support Status

✅ Windows: Supported (CI-tested on GitHub Actions)
✅ Linux: Supported (CI-tested on GitHub Actions)
✅ macOS (Apple Silicon): Supported (CI-tested on GitHub Actions; OpenMP disabled by default)

Python versions: Tested on Python 3.11, 3.12, 3.13

Build Requirements (Mandatory)

PV Circuit Model includes compiled C++/Cython extensions A native build toolchain must be available at installation time.

• Windows: Microsoft Visual C++ Build Tools (MSVC)
• Linux: A C/C++ compiler toolchain (e.g. gcc, g++, make) with OpenMP support
• macOS: A C/C++ compiler toolchain (e.g. Xcode Command Line Tools) will be required once macOS support is validated Precompiled wheels are not yet provided for all platforms; building from source is currently required.

Validation / Benchmarking

Since v0.2.0, PV Circuit Model calculation outputs are compared to LTspice Version (x64): 24.0.12 as part of the test plan. See test/a05-a10 cases. All I-V curves points agree to within 0.01% (1e-4) and the Pmax agree to within 0.001% (1e-5).