Development and testing of a solar cell test chamber for performance evaluation of solar cells

Use of renewable energy is becoming extremely important with time due to depleting fossil fuels and increasing CO2 levels causing global warming. With increasing focus on renewable energy technologies, research into development and testing of photovoltaic (PV) based solar cells has gained eminence, particularly towards improvement in their functional efficiency. This research was carried out to design, develop and test a prototype solar cell test chamber. The design can be used to develop a standard and unified testing procedure based on this design to quantify the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. Tests on the prototype were carried out using a standard solar cell and the results of the cell performance under different operating parameters are presented in this paper.