An Optical-Based Comparative Study to Detect Best Configurations for Installation of Monofacial and Bifacial PV Technologies

By the continuous growing share of bifacial photovoltaic (bPV) systems, finding the appropriate design and operating strategies for them is getting essential more and more. Taking this point into account, here, the effect of albedo, tilt and azimuth angles, as well as elevation, which are the four important configuration-related parameters, is found and compared for a monofacial module and a bifacial module with almost the same specifications. The investigation is performed using the view factor approach, and by choosing the amount of received solar radiation of the front and back, in addition to the bifacial gain as the performance indicators. The parametric studies have demonstrated that when the albedo changes from 0.1 to 0.9, the radiation on the back side increases 6.93 times. Furthermore, when elevation increases from 0.6 to 3 m, received solar radiation on the front does not increase or decrease. In addition, a direct and an adverse variation trend has been found for azimuth and tilt angles with the highest received solar radiation levels on the back and front surfaces, respectively. The higher sensitivity of the bifacial module compared to the monofacial one has been also detected, which highlights the more vital role of optical controlling of this type.