Performance of bifacial-silicon heterojunction modules under desert environment

Bifacial silicon Photovoltaic (PV) technology has the advantage of generating more energy output as compared with the conventional mono-facial technology. In this paper, a comparison is made between the performances of two bifacial silicon heterojunction modules mounted at two configurations under Qatar's climatic conditions: a tilt angle of 22° facing south and a tilt angle of 90° (vertical) facing east-west. The bifacial module mounted under standard tilt showed a 14% higher energy yield over the vertically tilted bifacial module. This is mainly due to higher irradiance received by the 22° tilted module relative to the vertically tilted module. On the other hand, a thermal model has been developed using COMSOL Multiphysics to calculate the theoretical power output, energy yield and module temperature. A gain in the short circuit current is found to increase linearly with the ratio of the diffuse irradiance to plane of array irradiance.