Modeling the energy gain reduction due to shadow in flat-plate solar collectors; Application of artificial intelligence

Energy lost due to shadow in the absorber plate of solar collectors can decrease the solar energy gain. In some studies, mathematical modeling was applied for calculating the energy gain reduction due to shadow in flat-plate solar collectors. In this study, ANN method was developed for modeling the energy gain reduction. Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) with one hidden layer and a range of neurons (5–30) by two training algorithms (LM and BR) and tangent sigmoid activation function (TanSig) were used by help of K-fold cross validation method. In the first section, six set of solar collector dimensions were used (1×1; 1×1.5; 1×2; 1.5×1.5; 1.5×2 and 2×2). In the second section all the range of dimensions were used as the inputs. The results of the first section showed that MLP with BR training algorithm can predict the energy gain reduction with minimum MAPE and RMSE in all the categories. The best results related to (1.5×1.5) dimension that achieved a MAPE of 0.15 ± 0.09% and RMASE of 4.42 ± 2.43 KJm⁻² year⁻¹, respectively. The results of the second section indicated that BR is a better training algorithm than LM. The MAPE and R² factors for the best topology (5-27-1) were 0.0610 ± 0.0051% and 0.9999 ± 0.0001, respectively. The results of the sensitivity analysis showed that height has the biggest impact on total energy gain reduction due to shadow in flat-plate solar collectors. Finally, the results of this study indicated that by using ANN and decrease the energy lost, the efficiency of solar collectors can be increased in all applications such as industry and agriculture.