Wherever you go, you will see more and more photovoltaic systems. Most people already know that solar panels can generate electricity, and they can be installed in homes and businesses to save electricity or increase revenue.
However, if you are curious and occasionally ask yourself “how do solar panels work?”, please read on, because we will uncover some mysteries about solar photovoltaic in this article.
First, let’s look at the sun. This is a huge nuclear reactor 147.1 million kilometers away from us. It transmits energy to the earth all the time. This energy is scattered to the universe in the form of photons.
Photons reaching the earth’s surface every hour provide more electricity than we use all over the world in a whole year.
All this energy is completely free and you can use it yourself.
Use this energy in a practical way – that’s what solar photovoltaic panels do
How do solar panels convert sunlight into electricity?
Solar panels are a collection of many solar cells (PV) and are covered with protective glass, which are fixed together with an aluminum alloy frame. These photovoltaic solar cells are made of semiconductor material silicon and are thinly sliced.
Each photovoltaic cell has a negative layer and a positive layer. The negative electrode has excess electrons, and the positive electrode has holes to hold these electrons (it can be imagined that there is no ball in the octopus ball pot).
Electrons move under the action of a built-in electric field and will produce voltage differences. Therefore, for solar panels, we only need some energy to make electrons break away from the current binding force, so that they will flow from the negative layer to the positive layer.
Yes, this energy source is the sun. Photons from the sun hitting the earth’s surface all the time are the key to solving the problem of how solar panels work.
The energy from these photons makes the electrons in the negative pole of the photovoltaic cell break away from the binding of the magnetic field and move them, which means that we now have a current that can flow, which is called the photovoltaic effect.
This is just the beginning of understanding how solar panels work because these electrons need conductors to pass through and act on power equipment. So how did this happen?
The path we create for electrons is called a circuit. When they leave the negative electrode of the solar cell, we want them to flow through our loads (such as our LED lights and household appliances) so that electrons can provide energy for these loads when they reach the positive layer of the solar cell.
The flow of current is important
Solar photovoltaic panels produce direct current (DC), but we use alternating current (AC) at home. In order to solve this problem, we add an inverter to the photovoltaic system to convert DC into AC.
The inverter is the key factor to determine how solar panels work because if there is no inverter in our photovoltaic system, we can’t use the power generated by solar panels to do many things.
The main types of inverters are the centralized inverter, series inverter, and microinverter.
Microinverter
Microinverter is a small device that can be directly installed under solar panels. The microinverter is designed to process power from one (or sometimes two) solar panels and convert DC to AC on the spot. Some manufacturers even integrate microinverters into solar panels and call them “AC modules”.
Series inverter
The larger series inverter is designed to convert a large number of photovoltaic modules to form the DC power supply of the photovoltaic array. They are as small as 3 kW and as large as more than 200 kW.
Using these solar inverters, you can connect the solar panels together in series and provide DC voltage to the inverter. The inverter then reduces it to the AC voltage suitable for the home or enterprise where the system is installed.
