Investigation of The Effects of Accumulated Dust on The Performance of Photovoltaic Modules

Abstract

While, solar photovoltaic (PV) for clean electricity generation is promising, ensuring its optimum performance is crucial for sustainability. Accumulation of dust from the outdoor environment on the modules of PV system is natural, but dust becomes a major issue in the performance of PV systems in the Sahara region, like Libya, where the availability of high solar radiation. The considerable increase of installations in desert areas, it makes essential to assess the resistance of modules to sand and weather conditions in various areas of the country. This thesis will investigate the effect of dust on PV module performance. The important of this work came due to the transfer of large scale PV technology to the local area characterized by hot and dusty conditions for most seasons that is represents the main barrier to PV utilization. A fundamental understanding of how dust affects PV module performance is presented. However, further investigation on induced shading and losses of electrical PV module performance due to dust accumulation is conducted. A mathematical simulation model to justify the shape of the typical behavior of the electrical characteristics in the presence of shading on the tilted module surface is considered. The simulation results will be applied to develop a dust correction model for long term energy prediction for PV modules that is able to provide better energy prediction and possible variation in the PV module performance over long period of time. On the other hand, experimental investigation was carried out in order to study the effect of dust accumulation on PV module and to compare the results with that obtained from the simulation procedure. It is found that the degradation in power output from the module is related to the linear dependence of the current with the solar irradiance (light transmittance), since the open circuit voltage increases logarithmically with intensity which means that there is a small variation in PV module output voltage.