ASSESSING THE INFLUENCE OF DUST ON SOLAR PANEL EFFICIENCY USING PREDICTIVE MODELS

The power delivered by a photovoltaic (PV) module defends on the amount of solar irradiance that reaches the solar cells, however dust particles deposition on the surface of the modules are mostly responsible for limiting the amount of radiation reaching the solar cells, thereby reducing the power delivered by the cells. Despite the significance of this, the effect of dust on the performance of solar modules have not been properly modeled, hence the need to study the resultant effects on the PV system. In this study, a test bed for the measurement of cell temperature TC, open circuit voltage (VOC), short circuit current (ISC), module load current (IL), and module load voltage (VL), from two identical PV modules was installed, also the mass of the dust deposition on the PV module was measured and recorded using a high precision balance measurement. The generated data were pre-processed and utilized to generate I-V and P-V characteristic curves as a function of dust, the curves generated for the PV module were found to compare satisfactorily well with those obtained from existing conventional PV model. The results obtained shows that ISC drops by about 1.84%, for every 1 (g/m2) increase in dust on the surface of the module, similarly, However, the effect of dust on VOC and cell temperature TC is fairly insignificant as both only decrease by less than 0.01%. As a corollary, the findings of this study will assist in achieving an optimum utilization of PV infrastructure for cost effective energy delivery