Performance evaluation of a photovoltaic system with the two-position tracker in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil
International Journal of Development Research
Performance evaluation of a photovoltaic system with the two-position tracker in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil
Received 11th March, 2022; Received in revised form 21st April, 2022; Accepted 19th May, 2022; Published online 22nd June, 2022
Copyright © 2022, Felipe Teles et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
The present study evaluated a photovoltaic system with a tracker of two daily positions located at the State University of Ceará (UECE), Fortaleza, Ceará. A 50 Wp rated power system with a two-position manual tracker daily was compared with a fixed system at 0º in the horizontal plane. The results of the three stages of the experiment were collected in 16 days, in July/2021 and August/2021. Several data were collected, such as solar irradiation, electricity generated, and battery charge status. Other data were calculated from the data collected, such as reference productivity, the productivity of photovoltaic arrangement, the efficiency of photovoltaic arrangement, performance ratio (PR), and capacity factor (CF). The system with the two-position daily tracker generated 23.86% more electricity than the fixed system. In an additional comparison, a system with a manual tracker of 3 daily positions generated 29.89% more electrical energy than the fixed system. Finally, a simulation was performed in the Radiasol 2 program, seeking to perform a comparison similar to the practical experiment.