Performance Evaluation of Artificial Neural Networks in Estimating Global Solar Radiation, Case Study: New Borg El-arab City, Egypt

The most sustainable source of energy with unlimited reserves is the solar energy, which is the main source of all types of energy on earth. Accurate knowledge of solar radiation is considered to be the first step in solar energy availability assessment. It is also the primary input for various solar energy applications. The unavailability of the solar radiation measurements for several sites around the world leads to proposing different models for predicting the global solar radiation. Artificial neural network technique is considered to be an effective tool for modelling nonlinear systems and requires fewer input parameters. This work aims to investigate the performance of artificial neural network-based models in estimating global solar radiation. To achieve this goal, measured data set of global solar radiation for the case study location (Lat. 30˚ 51 N and long. 29˚ 34 E) are utilized for model establishment and validation. Mostly, common statistical indicators are employed for evaluating the performance of these models and recognizing the best model. The obtained results show that the artificial neural network models demonstrate promising performance in the prediction of global solar radiation. In addition, the proposed models provide superior consistency between the measured and estimated values.