%0 Journal Article %A Wu, Xiaofeng %A Bliss, Martin %A Sinha, Archana %A Betts, Tom %A Gupta, Rajesh %A Gottschalg, Ralph %D 2015 %T Accelerated spatially resolved electrical simulation of photovoltaic devices using photovoltaic-oriented nodal analysis %U https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/articles/journal_contribution/Accelerated_spatially_resolved_electrical_simulation_of_photovoltaic_devices_using_photovoltaic-oriented_nodal_analysis/9564764 %2 https://repository.lboro.ac.uk/ndownloader/files/17197100 %K Circuit simulation %K Nodal analysis %K Numerical simulation %K Parallel computing %K Photovoltaic (PV) cells %K Mechanical Engineering not elsewhere classified %X 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. %I Loughborough University