Reliable and low cost global, direct and diffuse irradiance monitoring tool for accurate yield predictions

Reliable and low cost global, direct and diffuse irradiance monitoring tool for accurate yield predictions

Valladolid Calderon, Miguel (TU Delft Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)

Smets, A.H.M. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Electrical Engineering | Sustainable Energy Technology

2017-10-31

Solar energy is the most promising source for electricity generation, the photovoltaic installed capacity has grown exponentially in the last years. The scale of these systems can be from households to energy plants, all systems have in common the need of a monitoring system that can determine if the system is performing correctly or it needs maintenance.

Ideally there should be a device to measure irradiance in every photovoltaic system to have measurements taken in the same location and orientation as the system.
The cost of irradiance measuring devices makes it impossible to have these devices in every installation. Most efficiency estimations for photovoltaic systems use irradiance information from other location or rely on irradiance models, but they come with considerable deviations since weather can easily change from site to site and do not consider on site obstacles as buildings that decrease the available irradiance, or simply because there is no measuring station nearby.

In this research project, a low cost and reliable irradiance measuring tool based on photodiodes was developed to estimate on site irradiance and help to tackle the before mentioned problem. This tool is capable of estimating global, direct and diffuse irradiation within a +/- 10 deviation compared to expensive sensors, which makes it suitable for most photovoltaic systems applications.

irradiance
photodiode
solar cell

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:8ce5bca8-5628-4474-ad68-6905447a56ce

Student theses

master thesis

© 2017 Miguel Valladolid Calderon