The accumulation of dust and other particles on the photovoltaic (PV) modules leads to significant energy losses. NCPRE researchers investigated the dependence of module temperature on soiling by comparing the temperature of two 327W latitude-mounted PV modules installed at the Photovoltaic Module Monitoring Station (PVMMS), IIT Bombay, Mumbai. One module was manually cleaned daily using a wet mop, and the other was never cleaned. The modules’ ISC, VOC, Pmax, and temperature were measured at 1-minute intervals. Data corresponding to shadows cast on the panels or pyranometers were filtered out. After analysing the data from March 2015 to April 2017, we observed that the soiled module is seen to have a lower temperature than the clean module, and the temperature difference between the two increases as the extent of soiling increases. The soiling rates were extracted from the daily energy time series data (SRE), performance ratio (PR), and temperature-corrected performance ratio (TcorrPR) to monitor the effect of the temperature difference between the soiled and clean modules caused by the soiling.
Soiling ratio in terms of Energy, PR and TcorrPR of clean and soiled module for the period of 15th October 2016 to 15th January 2017.