Bifacial PV Software for Sandia Repository
A computationally efficient view-factor approach is available to accurately simulate and predict the global energy output of bifacial solar modules, accelerating deployment and modeling for solar farms.
Interest in bifacial photovoltaics (PV) in solar cell technology has been growing in the past years. A worldwide map of their potential performance can help assess and accelerate the global deployment of this emerging technology; however, the existing literature only highlights optimized bifacial PV for a few geographic locations or develops worldwide performance maps for very specific configurations, such as vertical installation. There is a need to be able to predict the energy yield of a bifacial solar module globally.
Researchers at Purdue University have developed the code to simulate the performance of a bifacial solar module. This technology can be used to calculate the energy output of bifacial PV modules. This view-factor approach is superior to current ray tracing methods due to it being more computationally efficient.
Advantages:
-Computationally efficient
-Boost bifacial gain
Potential Applications:
-Sandia National Lab repository
-Bifacial Solar Cell technology
-Solar Farm modeling
TRL: 9
Intellectual Property:
Copyright, 2018-03-26, United States
Keywords: bifacial photovoltaics, PV, solar cell technology, energy yield prediction, bifacial solar module, view-factor approach, computationally efficient, bifacial gain, solar farm modeling, solar performance map