Time-Effective Dust Deposition Analysis of PV Modules Based on Finite Element Simulation for Candidate Site Determination

Abstract

For a photovoltaic (PV) power generation system, the shading effect of PV panels caused by dust deposition is extremely unfavorable. The deposition of dust results in a severe reduction of power generation output, since the efficiency of PV panels is affected by the shading irradiance and blocking the cooling. In this study, a numerical simulation method is proposed to model the dust accumulation on PV panels to detect the effects on PV power generation caused by different wind directions and wind speeds. Due to the high accuracy of numerical simulation, and the short calculation cycle, the proposed method provides a certain prediction for the soiling management of PV panels in the wind-sand environment. Through simulations and experiments, the impacts of dust accumulation on the performance of PV panels with different wind directions are studied in detail with the wind speed changing from 4.43 m/s to 6.48 m/s and the dust particle size of 10 µm to 100 µm, which are based on the environment of Liverpool, England in a year. Besides, for PV arrays, the turbulences of the dust distribution around the PV panels are also analyzed. The data collected from experiments and simulations are used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Computational prediction of dust deposition on solar panels

“…Most of the studies focused on the performance of the PV panel after the dust accumulation. However, the behavior and characteristics of the dust deposition process itself have seldom been studied (Lu and Zhao 2019;Wu et al 2020). Studying the effect of different dust materials on the dust deposition rate was not found in the literature.…”

“…It was found that the dust accumulation reached 0.644 g/m 2 after 1 week of exposure in the dry season, which resulted in a power loss of 7.4%. Few studies used the numerical methods of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to investigate the dust behavior around the solar PV panels, although they have become a powerful tool in modeling the fluid motion including dust deposition (Wu et al 2020). For example, Lu et al (2016) investigated the dust deposition characteristics on solar PV panels.…”

“…Chiteka et al (2019) investigated the influence of the installation parameters on the dust deposition for ground mounted solar PV panels. Wu et al (2020) predicted the dust deposition for different wind velocities and wind directions based on the environment of Liverpool. The results indicated that the solar PV output power decreased by a ratio from 46 to 70% due to dust deposition and temperature increase.…”

A Review for Solar Panel Fire Accident Prevention in Large-Scale PV Applications

“…The preventive actions include array recombination and detection algorithm research. The studies [40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50] illustrate the reconfiguration of PV modules or PV arrays, and the studies introduce algorithm to detect the faulty PV modules.…”

“…As shown Figure 10, the spacing D between two PV panels should be large enough to avoiding shading effect, which is selected according to latitude, time angle, etc. The latitude angle (φ) of the winter solstice is (-23.45 °), and the time angle (ω) corresponding to 9:00 am is 45 ° [41][42]. In this case, not only the optimal photoelectric conversion efficiency can be guaranteed, but also the TKE value can be obtained to avoid the dust deposition.…”