Otimização do posicionamento de coletores solares

Abstract

The increasing demand for electricity and the possible collapse of production capacity from conventional power plants and the increase of production costs open possibilities for the use of new types of energy production, alternatives to petroleum. There are several types of renewable energy, such as the use of sunlight for direct production of electricity or for heating water. For the best use of the solar rays, the solar collectors should be oriented in the best possible way. Manufacturers and several authors of books on solar collector implementations recommend using latitude as the angle of inclination, or with some variation, for the panels. Real data of direct solar radiation were used to reach the best positioning according to the description of factor Rb (inclination factor for direct solar radiation) by three authors, Duffie and Beckman (2006) and Kalogirou (2016). A Matlab program was developed to scan every day of the year and collect the direct radiation data for each hour of the day, and turn the total into kWh/m2year, which is the most viewed form in solar maps and is easily converted to kWh/ m2month or kWh/m2day. The simulation was applied in the beginning in Curitiba/PR and in several localities taking into account the difference of latitudes of different cities of Brazil. Winter has been taken into consideration for applications that require more energy in this period, such as solar water heaters. It was concluded that latitude can be used as an angle of inclination for solar panels, but for big projects, a gain of up to 1.0% can be achieved if used the developed simulation.