Design Optimization of Photovoltaic Arrays on Curved Surfaces
Sangyoung Parka and Samarjit Chakrabortyb
Chair of Real‐Time Computer Systems, Technical University of Munich, Germany
asangyoung.park@tum.de
bsamarjit@tum.de
ABSTRACT
Flexible photovoltaic (PV) arrays often have to be mounted on surfaces that have a significant amount of curvature. These include solar‐powered vehicles, planes, and also some wearable devices. However, this inevitably leads to nonuniform solar irradiance among connected PV cells. If one cell among series‐connected PV cells receives significantly lower solar irradiance, the overall power generation of the string is reduced. While previous works dealt with this by employing sophisticated run-time techniques, we show that design‐time approaches that determine the electrical series‐parallel connection of a PV array could also significantly enhance the power output. In this paper, we propose a k‐means clustering‐based algorithm to group PV cells/modules with similar solar irradiance to form a PV string, even allowing irregular arrays, to maximize the power generation of the array for a given irradiance profile. Our experimental results show that the power generation of a PV array could be increased by 84% compared to usual PV array organizations that do not take the curvature of the mounted surface into account.
