Developing an Automatic Dust Cleaning Unit to Improve the Photovoltaic Panels productivity

Abstract

Egypt has one of the best weather conditions for producing renewable energy in the world. As a result, there has been a proven market pull for solar energy in the region in a growing clean energy export market as clean energy. Solar energy maintenance is relatively low comparing to other power generation sources. Although, less maintenance is required, the important factor that reduces its generation according to accumulate dust on solar PV modules. Dust accumulation effectively reduces the energy yield of solar panels. So, the current paper deals with the locally designed automatic cleaning mechanism for solar PV modules. The designed mechanism consists of an electronic solar module that automatically cleans the solar module at the required rate. without requiring water to clean the solar module. This cleaning mechanism is also suitable for pole mounted street lighting systems where daily manual cleaning is not possible and could be more costly. Six months later from start experiments, the obtained results of PV panel recorded maximum value of volts, current and power were 18.1 V, 0.85 Amp 15.39 Watts respectively for cleaned one while it was decreased up to 8.87 V, 0.425 Amp and 3.77 Watt for the un-cleaned respectively. The use of the developed cleaning unit improves the energy produced from PV panel by 42.32% compared to the control.