Effects of agricultural dust deposition on photovoltaic panel performance

Solar photovoltaic (PV) systems have shown their potential in agricultural projects around the world, especially concerning at the farm.Accumulation of dirt or particles like dust, water, sand and moss on the surface of solar photovoltaic panels obstruct or distract absorbing the sun light and consequently affects the panel performance. The main focus of this research was toquantitatively assess the impact of dust deposition onthe performance of PV panels.To this end,a series of experiments were carried out to investigate the effects of different particles load on mono-crystalline silicon (mono-Si) PV module. Parameters such as I-V and P-V curves, open-circuit voltage (Voc), short-circuit current (Isc), maximum output current (Imax), maximum output voltage (Vmax), maximum power output (Pmax) and fill factor (FF) were evaluated based on the output of the experiments. In order to assess the effects of the imposed particles and ignoring the other environmental effects, an in-house sun simulator was used for all experiments. A single particle size 100µm on three dust load 5, 10 and 15 g was used at different experiments. Results showed that the maximum power loss occurs on 15 g dust load which is about 51.82%. The maximum loss on Voc and Vmaxfor 15 g dust loadwas about 8.03% and 13.33%, respectively. Isc and Imax lost their values by 45.30% and 44.41% for15 g dust load.