The elevation and azimuth of a solar panel are important parameters in calculating the performance of the panel.
Imagine a rod sticking out of the panel perpendicular to the surface. This rod will ideally point directly at the sun at all times. At any give time, you could measure the angle the rod makes with a horizontal plane (the elevation, or tilt), and the direction the rod is pointing (the azimuth, measured clockwise from north). These two variables can be plugged into a formula (see, for example: http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/arbitrary-orientation-and-tilt) to allow you to calculate the solar radiation on the surface of the panel, and see how efficient it is.
Unfortunately, most panels don't have a rod sticking out of them, but it's easy to measure the panel's angle with the ground along both the length and width, and calculate how such a rod would point if it were there. Conversely, if you were installing a panel and wanted to optimiize performance for a specific time, you could orient the panel by its tilt in both directions to arrive at the combine tilt desired.
I lied in the previous paragraph. It's not easy, at least not for me; I've forgotten most of the trigonometry I ever learned, and didn't learn a lot of advanced stuff that might make this easy. It looks easy, though, so I'm hoping someone will tell me the secret to developing a model which takes the panel's 2 orthogonal tilts as input, and outputs the combined azimuth (that much is easy, even for me) and tilt. I'm missing something obvious, I think.
Imagine a rod sticking out of the panel perpendicular to the surface. This rod will ideally point directly at the sun at all times. At any give time, you could measure the angle the rod makes with a horizontal plane (the elevation, or tilt), and the direction the rod is pointing (the azimuth, measured clockwise from north). These two variables can be plugged into a formula (see, for example: http://www.pveducation.org/pvcdrom/properties-of-sunlight/arbitrary-orientation-and-tilt) to allow you to calculate the solar radiation on the surface of the panel, and see how efficient it is.
Unfortunately, most panels don't have a rod sticking out of them, but it's easy to measure the panel's angle with the ground along both the length and width, and calculate how such a rod would point if it were there. Conversely, if you were installing a panel and wanted to optimiize performance for a specific time, you could orient the panel by its tilt in both directions to arrive at the combine tilt desired.
I lied in the previous paragraph. It's not easy, at least not for me; I've forgotten most of the trigonometry I ever learned, and didn't learn a lot of advanced stuff that might make this easy. It looks easy, though, so I'm hoping someone will tell me the secret to developing a model which takes the panel's 2 orthogonal tilts as input, and outputs the combined azimuth (that much is easy, even for me) and tilt. I'm missing something obvious, I think.
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