Experimental Evaluation of the Optimum Tilt Angle for Fixed Photovoltaic Modules

Abstract

Nowadays photovoltaic (PV) cells have a rather small conversion efficiency, generally under 20 percent for the commercial units. Further on, the amount of electricity produced by a photovoltaic system is deeply influenced by some external factors, the most significant being the solar radiation intensity and the ambient temperature. In this paper an analysis of the motion of the sun influence will be presented, as the sun’s position throughout the year significantly affects the output of PV systems. Experimental analysis will be conducted on a small-scale PV system model within the Efficient and Sustainable Energy Research Platform (ENERED) research platform of the “Gheorghe Asachi” Technical University of Iasi, Romania, in order to evaluate the optimum PV module tilt angle for city of Iasi specific geographic coordinates.