The Effect of Dust on Transmission and Self-cleaning Property of Solar Panels

While how to improve the efficiency of solar cells is commonly researched, the effect of dust-fall on solar cell efficiency in the local Singapore weather has been largely neglected. In this work we investigated the conditions affecting dust-fall in Singapore and its effect on the optical transmissi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEnergy procedia Vol. 15; pp. 421 - 427
Main Authors Hee, Jia Yun, Kumar, Lalit Verma, Danner, Aaron James, Yang, Hyunsoo, Bhatia, Charanjit Singh
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Elsevier Ltd 2012
Subjects
dust accumulation
Solar panels
titanium oxide
transmission
transmission
Solar panels
dust accumulation
titanium oxide
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Summary:While how to improve the efficiency of solar cells is commonly researched, the effect of dust-fall on solar cell efficiency in the local Singapore weather has been largely neglected. In this work we investigated the conditions affecting dust-fall in Singapore and its effect on the optical transmission through glass modules. It was found that for bare glass samples, transmission reduces despite the heavy rains in Singapore over several months. After 33 days, transmission through plain glass slides reduced from 90.7% to 87.6%. Samples located nearer sources of dust and other contaminant particles such as heavy traffic, were more adversely affected compared to those which were situated in greenery. We also investigated the effect of substrate tilt in keeping them clean. Bare glass substrates were tilted at angles of 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80 and 90 degrees during outdoor exposure. The transmission through the lower parts of the substrates tilted at a fixed angle, was generally worse than the upper part as dust is washed downwards. After 33 days, the average transmission through the upper part of sides was 88.7%, while through the lower part it was 87.9%. We also investigated the performance of TiO2 films as an outdoor self-cleaning coating for solar panels. TiO2 films of different thicknesses were deposited on glass substrate by hydrolysis method which is a low-cost and commercially viable process. We will present the outdoor performance of TiO2 films, and discuss the optimised film parameters for solar cell applications.
ISSN:1876-6102
1876-6102
DOI:10.1016/j.egypro.2012.02.051