Impact of Temperature & Illumination for Improvement in Photovoltaic System Efficiency

Abstract

Temperature and Illumination has strong impact on photovoltaic systems output power. This research is focused to boost up the annual power production by investigating combined effect of temperature and Illumination. For this purpose, two solutions are purposed to improve annual power production and efficiency. First purposed solution is solar radiation tracker system to track sun for the optimal amount of radiations depending on the annual weather data available for Pakistan. The tracking system is studied for Horizontal, Vertical and dual axes trackers. It is found that this technique is very useful to boost the power production in most of the months of year over the fixed PV system approach. Second purposed solution is selection of suitable PV module types in which the act of changing the PV module types was investigated. Two types (California Energy Commission module and Sandia module) are used over the conventional simplified silicon crystalline module. The results are very promising, in which a significant improvement is noted in both radiation harvesting and power production over the simplified module. Both these purposed solutions are examined in detail and it shows 20% annual power production improvement for the case of Pakistan.