The influence of dust deposition on the temperature of soiling photovoltaic glass under lighting and windy conditions

Abstract

Module temperature has significant influence on the energy harvest and energy conversion efficiency of solar cells, which varies greatly with dust deposition and the wind-blowing. In this paper, several sets of experiments were carried out to test the temperature of soiling photovoltaic glass plate under lighting and windy conditions. The results indicate that the temperature of the upper and lower surface is much higher than that of the clean glass plate, and the dust deposition can exert great impact on the temperature of lower surface compared with that on the upper surface. At the same time, under the lighting and windy conditions, the maximum temperature of the photovoltaic glass plate decreases exponentially with increasing wind speed. The final temperature of clean glass plate tends to be consistent with the ambient one, while the temperature of dusty glass plate is much higher than air temperature. Through simulating the external electromagnetic field of spherical particle irradiated by the plane wave, we firstly found that the deposition particles can result in light convergence in its wavefront direction, and the light intensity can also be enhanced, significantly heating the glass plate. All our preliminary results throw light on the effect of dust deposition on the photovoltaic panel temperature in the desert, which can be helpful to establish a more reliable physical model of photovoltaic power generation efficiency involving environmental factors.