Designing of homemade soiling station to explore soiling loss effects on PV modules

Abstract

Due to soiling on Photovoltaic modules, the active area reduces causing loss in short circuit current of the device due to lower light transmittance. Soiling on Photovoltaic modules depends upon environmental factors like wind, humidity, dust composition, tilt angle, orientation, and material of the module. Soiling loss studies conducted in outdoor conditions are unreliable as environmental factors are uncontrolled and vary with time hence there is a need to explore an indoor soiling station having controlled environment and stimulated conditions. This study reports an indoor soiling station with controlled environment capable to simulate the daily outdoor soil cycle in few hours. The designed soiling station is featured with cost reduction, design improvements, and automation that has been designed to simulate the soiling effects to study the effects of environmental parameters under desired and controlled conditions. The proposed soiling station is capable to explore optimized soiling loss effects on Photovoltaic modules by varying tilt angle, humidity, wind speed, and temperature. The soiling uniformity in the soiling chamber was confirmed by using Scanning Electron Microscopy and ultraviolet–visible spectroscopy while average diameter of soil particles was found to be 8.21 µm. The daily cycle of outdoor conditions has been performed on the module and it was found that after 7 daily soil cycles, the module lost 33.54% of short circuit current. In future work, same soiling station will be utilized to study effect of anti-soiling coating, economics of different cleaning processes, and the soiling loss at variable humidity, wind speed, and tilt angle.