The experimental analysis of dust deposition effect on solar photovoltaic panels in Iran's desert environment

Since soiling is a site-specific problem, this paper for the first time performs controlled experiments to determine the characteristics of a dust sample from the desert region of Iran and its impact on the power efficiency of solar photovoltaic modules. Dust characterization experiments are performed using scanning electron microscope, Xray fluorescence, and elemental mapping. Elemental mapping tests, which have attracted little attention in photovoltaic soiling studies, will help researchers to investigate this phenomenon more accurately. For electrical evaluations, general relationships between losses caused by dust deposition and degradation of photovoltaic output parameters are obtained by testing different dust samples. The elemental results showed that the dust sample is mostly composed of Si, O, Al, and Ca elements. In addition, indoor experiments revealed that dust particles have different shapes and sizes (from 0.4 mu m to 31 mu m). When the dust density is increased from clean cell to almost dark shading conditions, it was observed that conversion efficiency, photovoltaic normalized maximum power, open-circuit current, and short-circuits current are decreased by 98.2% (non-linearly), 98.13% (non-linearly), 20.63% (linearly), and 98.02% (non-linearly), respectively. Furthermore, the results showed that soiling process has no significant impact on fill factor due to uniform dust dispersion on PV module.