Determination of Optimal Tilt Angle for SPV Panels Using Various Irradiation Models

Solar photovoltaic (SPV) systems have witnessed tremendous growth in the last decade due to their wide adoption throughout the world. These systems are installed on the ground or on rooftops of buildings and are either kept at a fixed tilt angle (TA) which is not efficient or are equipped with an irradiance sensor-based motor tracking system which is costly. Hence, manually changing the tilt angles using lever arrangement once a month is proven to be a better alternative. However, an effective TA is still needed to be calculated every month. This paper presents a comparison of four irradiance estimation methods like Liu-Jordan (LJ), Temps-Coulson (TC), Klucher (KL) and Badescu (BD) for determining the optimal tilt angle (OTA) for every month in a year for Pune city, Maharashtra in India. A MATLAB-based simulation study using various different meteorological parameters like global, diffused and direct solar radiations, air temperature, humidity and number of sunshine hours is given. An increase in PV output is seen using these OTAs.