Optimal Design of Solar Fields

The design of solar collector systems requires the use of solar radiation data, solar equipment and cost, energy backups, installation and maintenance cost, etc. An important parameter in a solar field design is shading between collector rows. This book, deals with the analysis of shading by a collector row on the adjacent row, the formulation of the optimization problem and the optimal design of thermal and photovoltaic solar fields. The book deal with several problems, such as: Obtaining maximum annual incident energy on the collector planes from a given field size or Finding the required minimum field area for a given incident energy. The last part of this book deals with the optimal design of single axis tracking collector fields.