Identifying the influence of design variations on the performance of PV systems for net-plus energy residential buildings in Egypt

Abstract

Net-zero and net-plus energy residential prototypes are becoming high prioritized due to the significant impact the buildings imply on the energy consumption and the environment. Although some previous studies investigated the influence of design variations for different parameters on the performance of a PV system, yet most of these studies did not focus on geometric parameters and how can they contribute in the overall performance of the system. This study proposes a methodology to investigate how the impact of design variations of a pre-defined set of parameters for a PV system on the total energy generated can be estimated through a few number of experiments. This study focused mainly on four parameters; the type of the PV technology used and three geometric parameters including; area, tilt angle and azimuth. The main effects and interactions between these parameters were computed using matrix algebra and Multiple linear regression. A representative case study in Cairo, Egypt is presented as an implementation of the proposed methodology to deduce a prediction model from a 2^4-1 fractional factorial, and the outcome of this model is validated. Results show that good estimates of most of these parameters are obtained, where aliasing was only limited to the two-factor interactions, which is an acceptable trade-off.