OPTIMUM DESIGN OF PHOTOVOLTAICPANEL ORIENTATION ANGLES

Abstract

Nowadays, with rising fuel cost and its bad effect on the atmosphere, there are many other possible alternatives such as solar energy. With the recent wide spread use of solar energy and photovoltaic solar cells, the researchers work hard to improve their performance to be attractive alternative to fossil fuel. This work presents the optimi-zation of the output power of the photovoltaic solar cell. This power is optimized based on studying the effect of the tilt, the azimuth and the incidence angles on its performance. Meta-model is utilized as an optimization technique. A case study de-velops 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order hyper-surface equations to get the optimum tilt angle and optimum azimuth angles for the city of Hurghada. The power produced from the 4th order hyper-surface model at full tracking system increases by 24.2% more than the y optimum tilt at fixed azimuth angle (facing south). By comparing themeta-model and the performance optimization technique, the error has been around 1.1%. Comparison has also been made between the cost of the fixed and full tracking photovoltaic system.