Section 8: Measuring I-V characteristics of a solar panel
Model 2460 Interactive SourceMeter® Instrument User's Manual
8-8
2460-900-01 Rev. A / September 2014
In the example above, the instrument is programmed to display custom text on the USER swipe
screen using the
display.changescreen
and
display.settext
commands. After the test is
finished, the display will indicate the maximum power (P
max
), the short circuit current (I
SC
), and the
open circuit voltage (V
OC
), as shown in the figure below.
Figure 46: Solar panel I-V sweep results on the USER swipe screen
After the code is executed, five values are returned in the Instrument Console of Test Script Builder
(TSB), and the measured current, voltage, and calculated power are displayed on the front panel of
the Model 2460. You can copy the data from the TSB Instrument Console into a spreadsheet such as
Microsoft
®
Excel
®
for graphing and further analysis. The figure below shows the results of graphing
the data in an Excel spreadsheet. Notice that the test on the solar panel was executed with light (light
ON) and in the dark (light OFF).
Figure 47: Solar panel I-V characteristics generated with and without light
