Design and development of self-cleaning PV sliding system

This study describes the designing steps of the proposed self-cleaning system for the photovoltaic (PV) system and experimentally investigates the effectiveness of the proposed self-cleaning PV sliding system for solar power plants under all Indian climate conditions. To investigate the performance of the proposed self-cleaning PV sliding system, we used three PV panels of 20 W with a sliding structure and another set of three PV panels of 20 W with a traditional (fixed) technique, and recorded the output power for the period of December 2019 to April 2021. The experimental results show that the proposed self-cleaning PV sliding system improved efficiency by 18.3%, 13.3% and 6.4%, respectively, in the summer, winter and post-monsoon seasons when compared to the fixed PV system. The results also revealed that energy consumption was very low when compared to the amount of energy gained. The proposed system not only cleans the PV system, but also protects it from hailstorms. The results of this study show that there is a significant improvement in PV efficiency and thus an increase in electricity production under all climate conditions. A system for automatic cleaning of PV panels was tested for 1 year and compared against PV panels with no cleaning system. A significant improvement in PV efficiency, and thus an increase in electricity production, was demonstrated under all climate conditions.