Very Short-Term Forecasting of Heating Energy Produced by Solar Parabolic Trough Collectors in a Residential Water Heater

Solar parabolic trough collectors are usually used as clean heat sources for water heating. Meanwhile, uncertain nature of solar irradiations affects their coefficient of performance significantly. Hence, accurate forecasting of solar heating energy extracted from parabolic collectors improves both reliability and resiliency of solar water heaters against severe operational conditions such as clear sky, haze clouds, partially cloudy sky, and overcast clouds. This paper proposes a fast and accurate algorithm for predicting the solar heating energy produced by the parabolic trough collectors in a residential-scale water heater with 5-min time resolution over a sample summer day. Simulations is carried out using Python programming language to minimize the mean squared error according to the estimated and actual values.