| Popis: |
Airborne dust accumulation or soiling phenomenon is one of the challenging issues that negatively affects the spectral transmittance and thus the energy yield of solar PV systems. Hence, cleaning can be necessary to ensure the performance of a PV module and its lifetime. The overall goal of this study is to propose a cleaning success index and to investigate the impact of cleaning events on the energy yield of a real PV plant in Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) in Burgdorf, Switzerland. The monitoring of the PV systems operates under cleaning cycle of once in 4 years since the region is characterized by a warm-temperate climate with an average annual temperature of 10.7 °C, and the rainfall is significant with an average annual precipitation of 1005.7 mm+/-13%. In this study, MATLAB software is used to pre-process and analyze ten years of recorded data. As known, PV module retrieves its performance after a cleaning event, then after a variable period, the performance decreases again. A methodology to evaluate the cleaning success is proposed and evaluated. For this purpose, the performance ratio (PR) is used to determine a cleaning success index. The latter indicates an average of 6 % after one month of cleaning and 2 % after one year of all cleaning events. |
