Abstract
Photovoltaic module surface soiling due to dust deposition is a common problem, especially in the desert environment. In Iraq, Massive dust and sand-storms are environmental phenomena that frequently occurs during the year. Increasing desertification and decreasing vegetation coverage are one of the reasons for the recurrence of this phenomenon. Dust accumulation can reduce the performance of photovoltaic modules output power. This paper investigates the effect of dust accumulation on the performance of PV modules and the possibility of the energy losses experimentally. For this purpose, a microcontroller based dual axes sun tracker is designed and installed at the rooftop of the Engineering faculty Building located at Kirkuk University Kirkuk, Iraq. Two identical PV modules and real-time measurements with data monitoring system are used in this study. This study covers measurements done in August and December (2017). The results showed that the dust deposition on PV module could cause significant losses in PV output power generation on both fixed and sun-tracking modules. However, the losses was less in tracker system.
Highlights
The renewable energy market has witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in recent years
The real-time data was collected from the photovoltaic module, and detailed analysis has been made with MATLAB software
The results showed that is a remarkable decrease in power due to dust accumulation
Summary
The renewable energy market has witnessed an unprecedented acceleration in recent years. Solar photovoltaics is boosting the growth of renewable in power capacity around the world. Some studies have been carried out to investigate the effect of weather conditions on photovoltaic performance. Many of these papers examined the relationship between PV output and dust deposition density [5, 6]. Others decided to make comparisons between types of dust and their particle sizes and analyses their effects for specific periods [7, 8] Most of these studies are implemented for fixed tilt angle. This work presents the effect of actual dust accumulation on the performance of photovoltaic modules for a different tilted angle by using a tracking system. A microcontroller based tracker system is designed and implemented to achieve this study
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