Softwares for designing, simulating or providing diagnosis of photovoltaic water-pumping systems

• Published in: Renewable energy Vol. 25; no. 1; pp. 101 - 113
• Main Authors: Tiba, C, Barbosa, E.M.de S
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Elsevier Ltd 2002; Elsevier Science
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Energy; Equipments, installations and applications; Exact sciences and technology; Natural energy; Photovoltaic conversion; Solar energy; Software; Water pumps; Computer simulation; Computer aided design; Fault diagnostic; Photovoltaic system
• ISSN: 0960-1481; 1879-0682
• DOI: 10.1016/S0960-1481(00)00172-5

This paper identifies and evaluates software programs for designing, simulating and providing diagnosis of photovoltaic water-pumping systems available in the world market. The identified software programs were evaluated according to the following general criteria: C1 summarizes their relative merits and their commercial availability, their updatedness (or whether they are updateable) and their user-friendliness; C2 groups the software specific merits, its versatility and capacity to analyze multiple configurations of photovoltaic water-pumping systems and the completeness of the different parts of the system to be analyzed; C3 groups the merits related to the database of parameters needed for running the software, in addition to the possibility of introducing new data; C4 deals with the validation of the relevant software, using experimental data. Results for several commercial software programs analyzed according to these criteria are given.