Abstract
The wide spread use of solar energy and photovoltaic solar cells attracts researchers to work hard for the objective of improving their performance to be a viable attractive alternative to fossil fuels. This work presents the optimization of the output power of a photovoltaic solar cell to harvest maximum power. The power is optimized based on PVP full tracking of the sun and the effect of the tilt, the azimuth, and the incidence angles on its performance. A meta-model is utilized as a tool in the optimization technique. A case study which develops 2nd, 3rd, and 4th order hyper-surface equations that depend on day and hour to get the optimum tilt angle and optimum azimuth angle for the city of Hurghada in Egypt. The power produced from the polynomial meta-model algorithm is higher by 25.5% over the fixed tilt and azimuth angles. The developed equations from the meta-model optimization technique can be used in tracking control systems to get optimum tilt and optimum azimuth angles at any hour and at any day. By comparing the metamodel and the lengthy performance optimization technique, the error is around 1.1%. Comparison has also been made between the cost of the fixed and full tracking photovoltaic systems.
