Modeling and experimental validation of dust impact on solar cell performance

Abstract

ABSTRACT Solar cells convert the irradiance to electricity, but environmental conditions affect cell performance. In this study, a general model for dust accumulation effect on solar cell performance is proposed. An improvement is introduced to the solar cell one-diode model by considering dust impact to simulate solar cell performance and particularly I-V characteristics. In this study, the novelty is to propose a dust model and improve the single-diode model. The proposed model accounts for the impact of dust on the PV performance by taking into consideration the dust ingredients. Three major components of Oman dust (SiO2, CaO, and Fe2O3) in different proportions were adopted to verify the proposed model using a 4.18 W solar cell. Also, dust samples were collected from six locations in Oman and used for validation in the lab by using a 125-W conventional PV module and solar simulator. I-V characteristics and power losses were determined to compare experimental, ideal, and proposed model results. When mixing 10 g of SiO2, CaO, and Fe2O3 to form 30 g of dust on the cell, the short-circuit current is 42.86% higher in the ideal model than the measureds short-circuit current, while the short-circuit current of the proposed model was 2.79% lower than the measured values. The results obtained from the proposed model are consistently close to the results from the experimental measurements even when using different masses of dust ingredients.