Designing with Bifacial Panels

Summary

The following article with walk you through the process of designing with your bifacial modules as well as the effects of bifacial on your design

Bifacial panels:

The information for whether a panel is bifacial or regular comes directly from the specifications of the module. You can read this information by going to control > design & hardware > module and selecting the edit icon:

The two fields that are taken into account are:

• Bifaciality:  This is the fractional amount of output that the rear side of the bifacial panel will provide when compared with the front. So if it only outputs 70% of the front then use the value of 0.7 here. Use a value of 0 for non-bifacial panels here.

• Transmission Factor: This factor which describes how much light will transmit through the bifacial panel. Use a value of 0 for non-bifacial panel.

Designing with Bifacial panels:

When designing with bifacial panels, you will receive a message in the left toolbar to notify you that you are using panels with bifacial characteristics:

Pro Tip: You can see production gains from the bifacial panels by clicking “System Losses” in the Summary tab of the left toolbar.

Notes:

• Raytracing is unavailable when designing with bifacial panels. If you would like to learn more about raytracing, please see this article. Shading can be adjusted by selecting the panel array and expanding the "Shading" section. Change the method from "Auto" to one of our manual options.
• When you set the tilt rack slope equal to the roof slope, the bifacial gain will be zero, since that mimics a flush-mount system on a roof.  This is something we will look to handle differently later, however in the interim if you're designing a tilt rack where all the modules in a group are on the same plane, you'll want to have at least a small difference in the slope and tilt rack inputs.  For example, a single group of modules on a tilt rack 20 degree with a slope of 20 degrees could be modeled by inputting '20' into the slope and '19' into the tilt rack degrees field.