Performance de Sistemas Fixos e Rastreadores Solares Correlacionando o Índice de Irradiância Difusa em Diferentes Áreas no Brasil

Abstract

Solar energy is available abundantly in nature, and a substantial drop in the costs related to photovoltaic systems was observed in the last years. Therefore, solar-based systems have assumed a leading position in the search for alternative sources of energy. Although the use of solar tracker in those systems is not essential, it is known that its use can boost the collected energy. To meet this increasing demand, it is necessary to consider the effect of several parameters that can harm the performance of solar trackers, such as different periods of time, geographical and weather conditions. For that reason, this paper aims to compare the performance of fixed photovoltaic systems and tracking systems in twenty cities in different regions in Brazil as well as their efficiency under different levels of diffuse irradiance and spacing among arrays of photovoltaic modules. Simulations were performed and compared for each location. The results show that the correlation between the tracker gain and diffuse index is -0.9063 for a 6 m pitch, -0.9101 for a 7 m pitch and -0.9184 for an 8 m pitch and the change of the pitch from 6 m to 8 m led to an average increase of 4% in the gain obtained. Therefore, it is envisaged the existence of an inverse correlation between the diffuse indexes and tracker gain as well as the influence of the chosen pitch for each location.