Accurate and reliable parameter estimation plays a pivotal part in the design of solar PV systems. However, the current PV parameter estimation (PVPE) methods still face great challenges due to the complicated characteristics of the PV models. In this paper, a novel meta-heuristic algorithm called improved simultaneous heat transfer search (ISHTS) is proposed to solve various PVPE problems. In ISHTS, two efficient strategies are embedded into the heat transfer search algorithm to improve the search performance. First, a simultaneous heat transfer strategy is adopted to diverse search equations for each generation to ameliorate the global detection. Second, a novel elitist perturbation strategy with adaptive perturbation amplitude is employed to enhance the local exploitation. The proposed ISHTS is applied to solve different PVPE problems including single diode, double diode, three diode and PV module. The performance of ISHTS is extensively compared with several state-of-the-art PVPE methods. Simulation results demonstrate that ISHTS achieves root-mean-square error (RSME) as low as , , and , and obtains standard deviation (SD) as small as , , and for four different PV models, respectively. Based on the simulation results, ISHTS has advantages in terms of solution accuracy, reliability and convergence for various PVPE problems.