2134/17346 Xiaofeng Wu Xiaofeng Wu Martin Bliss Martin Bliss Archana Sinha Archana Sinha Tom Betts Tom Betts Rajesh Gupta Rajesh Gupta Ralph Gottschalg Ralph Gottschalg Accelerated spatially resolved electrical simulation of photovoltaic devices using photovoltaic-oriented nodal analysis Loughborough University 2015 Circuit simulation Nodal analysis Numerical simulation Parallel computing Photovoltaic (PV) cells Mechanical Engineering not elsewhere classified 2015-04-23 12:37:33 Journal contribution https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Accelerated_spatially_resolved_electrical_simulation_of_photovoltaic_devices_using_photovoltaic-oriented_nodal_analysis/9564764 This paper presents photovoltaic-oriented nodal analysis (PVONA), a general and flexible tool for efficient spatially resolved simulations for photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules. This approach overcomes the major problem of the conventional Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis-based approaches for solving circuit network models, which is the limited number of nodes that can be simulated due to memory and computing time requirements. PVONA integrates a specifically designed sparse data structure and a graphics processing unit-based parallel conjugate gradient algorithm into a PV-oriented iterative Newton--Raphson solver. This first avoids the complicated and time-consuming netlist parsing, second saves memory space, and third accelerates the simulation procedure. In the tests, PVONA generated the local current and voltage maps of a model with 316 x 316 nodes with a thin-film PV cell in 15 s, i.e., using only 4.6% of the time required by the latest LTSpice package. The 2-D characterization is used as a case study and the potential application of PVONA toward quantitative analysis of electroluminescence are discussed.