This Software predict the bifacial Photovoltaic (PV) panel gain (which is the
percentage of excess solar energy generated by a bifacial PV compared to that of a
monfacial one installed at the same location and time. The software uses a
precalculated database to estimate bifacial gain values for any combination of four
independent variables. These parameters are:
1- The first input parameter is the “Period” or season for which calculations are
required. The entered input values are 1 to 12 for the corresponding months,
13 for yearly calculations, and 14 to 17 for the four seasons Autumn, Winter,
Spring, and Summer respectively.
2- The second input parameter is the “Latitude” which is the latitude of the
location to be studied. Latitude values can be any value between 1 and 65.
The program will round any fractions to the nearest integer value.
3- The software accepts any albedo value as its third input parameter. It will
automatically round any value entered to the nearest 0.05.
4- The last input parameter is the “Bifaciality”. It represents the ratio of the
backside PV efficiency to that of the front-side. The software rounds any
entered value to the nearest 10% between 60% and 90%.
Two versions of the program are made available. These are “Bifacial_PV_Gain”,
and “Bifacial_PV_Gain_Interactive”. The only difference between the two is that
while input arguments are directly entered when the first program is called, the
second program will prompt the user to enter each of the input arguments at a time.
The program will output a colored gain contour map against latitude and albedo with
the point of interest as a white circle with the value of the percentage gain rounded
to the nearest 1% shown beside it. The percentage gain value is also outputted on the
work space.
Example (1) Entering the following command in work space will output figure (1)
below
