Application of Reflectors for Improving the Output Performance of Solar Photovoltaic (PV) Modules

Abstract

Solar photovoltaics (PV) systems are widely used to generate electricity from sunrays. Concentrating solar photovoltaics has been studied as one of the best technologies introduced to improve the efficiency and output power of the solar PV system. Therefore, in this work, the application of mirror reflectors to improve the efficiency of monocrystalline and polycrystalline solar PV modules and the effect of utilizing different types of reflectors at different angles to the performance of the monocrystalline solar PV modules were studied. In this work, experimental and MATLAB simulation works have been carried out. The introduction of a reflector resulted in the increasing of solar irradiance, and also resulted in the increasing of short-circuit current, Isc, and output power, Pmax, while maintaining the value of open-circuit voltage, Voc. Solar PV modules with reflectors were able to capture more solar irradiance compared to the solar PV modules without reflector, with the percentage of the output power increment can be varied from 5 to 37%, depending on the type of PV modules, type of reflector, and the angle of the reflector. Polycrystalline solar PV modules with a mirror-reflector at an angle of 80° had shown better performances compared to the monocrystalline solar PV modules with the same reflector set-up, where the output power for the polycrystalline module was 6.3% higher than the monocrystalline modules. The increasing of the reflector angle from 20° to 80° resulted in the increasing of the output power generation, where the output power generation for the monocrystalline solar PV module with an aluminium reflector was 37% higher than the output power generated by the monocrystalline PV module without reflector, following by the white reflector and mirror reflector with output power increment percentage of 35% and 22%, respectively.