A Novel Intelligent Water Drops Optimization Approach for Estimating Global Solar Radiation

Abstract

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE AR-SA MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Measurement of solar radiance demands expensive devices to be used. Alternatively, estimator models are used instead. In this paper, a new method based on the empirical equations is introduced to estimate the monthly average daily global solar radiation on a horizontal surface. The proposed method uses Intelligent Water Drops Algorithm as a swarm-based nature-inspired optimization technique. The best coefficients of linear and nonlinear empirical models and global solar radiation are calculated for seven different climate regions of Iran using proposed algorithm written in MATLAB software. The results of the proposed method are compared with other techniques. The result shows that the proposed method is more accurate in estimating the monthly average daily global solar radiation.