The Experimental Study of Dust Effect on Solar Panel Efficiency

Abstract

This study shows the dust effect on solar panel efficiency based on experimental measurements. Sieve analysis has been performed to investigate the effect on the efficiency of the panel. Dust particles have been divided into different sizes such as (-75), (+75/-105), (+105/-250), (+250/-450). In addition, each piece weighed 20 g, uniformly sprinkled onto a 40-Watt SUNNY polycrystalline panel. In order to obtain the output voltages of the PV panel used a data acquisition card. Additionally, a photodiode sensor has been used in order to obtain the light reflection data from the panel to the outside while there had covered different diameters of dust particles on the panel. The data set consisting of electrical parameters have been used to compered both experimental study and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) output. There were 5 different data sets with the clean PV panel in this study (randomly selected data from it used as %40 training - %60 test) and the clean panel data have been used twice in the training and test part of the ANN. In this study, it has been observed that the ANN method can be used to estimate panel efficiency due to the linearity (The R-value was gotten nearly equal to 1 and it shows that there is a linear relationship between outputs and targets.) if the appropriate transfer function is selected. Also, this study shows that as the particle diameter covering the panel gets smaller, the output voltage of the panel decreases linearly.