Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2019
25th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
EVALUATION OF THE EFFICIENCY LOSS OF PHOTOVOLTAIC MODULES DUE TO URBAN DIRT – A CASE STUDY
Submission Author:
Felix do Rêgo Barros , RJ
Co-Authors:
Felix do Rêgo Barros, Manoel Antônio da Fonseca Costa Filho, David Soares, Luiz Cesar Coutinho Junior
Presenter: Manoel Antônio da Fonseca Costa Filho
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2019.COB2019-2222
Abstract
A photovoltaic (PV) power plant must operate at its maximum efficiency, which can be impacted by dirty accumulation. This study aims at evaluating energy efficiency losses due to dirt deposition through comparison between cleaned and uncleaned PV modules, in a 12-years operating PV system. A supervisory has recorded at every minute the incident global solar radiation, ambient and PV module’s temperatures, the individual and total currents, and the PV array’s voltage. All modules have never been actively cleaned before. Only three modules were daily cleaned with water plus detergent, jumping the weekends. This procedure was executed with a wet and dry season steps. The efficiency of each module was calculated dividing its daily energy output by the daily incident solar energy. For accounting energy efficiency losses only due to dirt deposition, the aging effect was removed from the analysis, taking the most degraded module as a reference and subtracting its efficiency from the other modules, to put all modules at the same level of aging. In wet periods, active cleaning is not cost-effective since raining promotes spontaneous cleaning. Daily average efficiency improvement rate due to cleaning was found at 0.07% and 0.29% in the wet and dry seasons, respectively.
Keywords
: photovoltaic, Solar Energy, efficiency loss, dirt deposition, PV aging
