Effect of air quality and dust deposition on power generation performance of photovoltaic module on building roof

Due to the dust deposition on the surface of photovoltaic modules and the air pollution, the power generation performance of photovoltaic modules will be significantly affected. In order to quantitatively estimate the effect of air quality and dust deposition on the power generation performance of photovoltaic modules, a distributed photovoltaic system on a building roof in Shanghai is studied in this paper. Both artificial and natural dust deposition conditions are tested in terms of the influence of these factors on the power generation efficiency of photovoltaic modules. The variation of solar radiation intensity with PM2.5 concentration in Shanghai and the variation of photovoltaic module power generation capacity with PM2.5 concentration are tested and analyzed. The experimental results show that the surface dust of photovoltaic module reduces the power and efficiency of photovoltaic module. Experimental comparison between the dusty photovoltaic module and clean photovoltaic module shows that the dust on photovoltaic modules can reduce the power and efficiency significantly, where the highest power generation decrease is 35.226% and the highest power generation efficiency decrease is 5.546% as indicated in the experiments. Result shows that the amount of solar radiation is exponentially correlated to the PM2.5 concentration.

Practical application: The influence of air quality and dust deposition on the performance of distributed PV modules is of vital importance under severe particulate pollution in Shanghai. This research helps predict the degradation of the photovoltaic system power generation efficiency, and determine whether to clean up the dust on the photovoltaic system according to accumulated PM concentration. This reduces the cost of cleaning of the dust on photovoltaic system. This study provides theoretical and experimental basis for the design of the building roof mounted solar photovoltaic system according to the local haze condition.