Impact of the solar energy system with and without reflector on home-scale batik industry

Abstract

Harvesting energy from solar has been growing significantly in the past decades. It enlarges the utilization of solar system technology, such as a photovoltaic system. Not only in the large-scale application, but also in the home-scale application. Indonesia is known for traditional batik clothing. There is a lot of various batik from different cities in Indonesia, and Yogyakarta is a city that offers authentic batik clothing. This paper reports the utilization of photovoltaic system in home-scale batik industry in Yogyakarta. The objective is to investigate the system whether there will be an extra power generated from the photovoltaic if a reflector is applied to the panel. There are two kinds of reflectors used in this experiment, they are mirror glass and aluminum foil. The experiment was conducted in the daytime where the amount of solar radiation is in the same intensity among three conditions; a system without reflector, with mirror glass reflector, and aluminum foil reflector. The result shows that in average, the system with mirror reflector has produced 15% higher output power compared to the system without the reflector, or 15.77 Watt higher to be precise.