A correlation between simulated and real PV system in naval conditions

Abstract

In the middle of a continuous and exponential development of renewable energies trend, generated by the increasing price of the conventional fuels which are quickly draining, and facing the fact that we have tremendous messages sent by our polluted Planet, the IMO (International Maritime Organization) returned its face to environment concerns in 2008. During time IMO has realized a series of environment impact studies of maritime domain and, in concordance with this idea, developed IMO's Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC). MEPC has given extensive consideration to control of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from ships which are implemented in MARPOL Annex VI as a new Chapter 4, entitled “Regulations on energy efficiency for ships”. We strongly believe that there will be a rapid grow in the number of ships which will have renewable energies systems onboard in the near future. One kind of energy that can be very well applied to the naval domain is the solar energy. As the technologies are developing very fast in the domain of photovoltaics, there is a continuous need of research in order to implement the best technical solutions in naval domain, which, as we know, presents different characteristics from classic terrain applications. Thus, there are some questions that we tried to respond on this article, as: “what is the difference between efficiency of an onboard installed PV panel and a classic terrain installed PV panel?; how much will affect the albedo of the water?; how much will affect the ships' oscillation moves?; how is comporting a vertical Sun facing PV panel and a non-facing one? To respond at these questions we realized a comparative study between a simulated PV system and its similar real system installed onboard, in order to determine the differences between results and estimate how much we can take in consideration from a simulated PV classic system when we design a real onboard PV system.