Modeling of Optimal PV Surfaces in BIPV Case Study Through Genetic Algorithms

Abstract

The growth of the world’s population demands greater amounts of energy to meet people’s basic needs. Currently, the use of fossil fuels supplies most of this energy demand, which generates greenhouse gas emissions that affect people’s health and contribute to global warming. This fact is accompanied by the accelerated growth of large cities, so the construction sector must re- spond to these demands, which allows us to think about the energy potential of surfaces exposed to solar radiation in buildings, roofs and facades as part of Building Integrated Photovoltaics (BIPV), generating prosumer nodes. Like- wise, the cost reduction of solar photovoltaic (PV) energy contributes to the integration of this technology in the residential sector, specially in the context of ”Colombian terraces”, corresponding to typical constructions located on top of houses and buildings, which have flat open spaces that serve as roofs. Therefore, the objective of this work is to analyze the capture of radiation in building terraces, in order to generate PV surfaces that maximize the sun energy captured. To achieve this, a Genetic Algorithm (GA) is integrated to a computational ray tracing tool are implemented, in order to evaluate the radiation captured by the surfaces, which have a projected flat area on the surface of the terrace of 1m2. This is achieved through the use of historical irradiance data in the city of Medellin, Colombia. The optimal photovoltaic surface obtained presents an additional 19.3% of captured energy and an ad- ditional area of 28% compared to the typical flat geometry for PV modules. This is a promising finding because it shows a direct relationship between radiation capture and the geometric shape of the photovoltaic surfaces in constructions context. Such geometry is validated through the commercial software TracePro.

Keywords: Building Integrated Photovoltaic, Modeling Photovoltaic 
Module, Curved PV Module, Topology Optimation, Curved PV Surface