Design of an Economic System for Improving the Performance of Three Types of PV Panels Using Solar Reflectors

Abstract

Increasing generated power of PV panels is a major issue. Solar reflectors could be one of the cheapest and easiest ways to increase that power. It's lower in cost than adding more solar PV panels. By modeling a Simulink-MATLAB test module, to be derived from the real input factors. The measured and (estimated by calculations) components of irradiance are important for PV system modeling, and a dataset of hourly dropped irradiance, and some other meteorological records were collected from February 2013 till the time of writing this paper. This paper presents the differences in the power ratio of the 3 types of PV modules before and after applying reflecting panels, the type of commercial reflector is (semi-diffuse, flexible reflector made of an aluminized PET laminate). The values of short circuit current Isc and open-circuit voltage Voc were measured under different conditions. Data can be used to validate the comparison between the theoretical and real calculations of the output power, also to find the best type of the 3 types of PV modules (1- Polycrystalline. 2- Thin film. 3-Mono crystalline) to be operated under the Egyptian environmental conditions. Low-cost reflecting materials could be a good solution. The effect is more electrons are generated and hence the output power of the solar module increases. This paper founds that the highest average power ratio of the whole 3 types is for Thin-film modules which is (1.421441667) which means the output power after installing the reflectors is increased by about 42% from the basic output.

Keywords

• pv solar reflectors
• commercial solar reflectors
• semi-diffuse reflectors