Evaluation and prediction of soiling loss on PV modules with artificially deposited dust

Dust or soot from the air causes significant losses in the PV modules. Evaluating the performance loss of photovoltaic modules in a location involves collecting data from a fielded PV system. This is usually a time consuming and a costly affair. Hence we propose collection of dust from an area, preferably from the module surface, and use it as dust sample so that the soiling experiments can be conducted in laboratories. Here a low-cost artificial dust deposition technique is introduced that could be used to deposit dust on a module surface in a controlled manner which would help to predict the soiling loss associated with various dust densities. This approach produced uniform soil coatings of various densities. Using the test dust we have deposited dust of varying densities which showed short-circuit current loss ranging from 4% to 49%. Dust from different parts of India was deposited using this technique to obtain uniform dust density of 0.25mg/cm². It was found that the dust from Agra showed highest soiling loss, followed by dust samples from Hanle, Jodhpur and Gurgaon. It was observed that dust samples from Agra and Gurgaon showed higher response in the wavelength range of 900 - 1100nm as compared to Hanle and Jodhpur.