Essay Example: Water Sprinklers for Cleaning PV Panels

Water Sprinklers

Water sprinklers depend only on water and gravity. Their main problem is that they need a lot of maintenance and they have a great effect of the electrical safety sue to having water sources nearby. The initial cost is quite high for building the system (Alshehri et.al, 2014).

Water Sprinklers

Methods of cleaning PVs

cost

Water consumption

Efficiency increase

Man power

Robotic Device for Cleaning PV

High initial cost

Low

Low efficiency

Requires man power

Manual Cleaning

Low

Very high

30 liters per meter squared

Low efficiency

High

4 people per meter squared

Self-cleaning

High

Low water used

High efficiency

Few people needed

TF-4 cleaning technology

High initial cost

Low water usage 1 liter per meter squared

Very efficient

Low man power

Rain

Low

High

Medium efficiency

No man power

Data Comparison

Solar energy comes from the sun in the form of Solar Irradiance, which can be directly converted by the photovoltaic cells into electricity. However, the cells have limited efficiency approximately 15-20% (Kuchiki et.al, 2015). Therefore, to increase the cells efficiency, the PV systems need to be improved. Improvements can be such as having sun trackers that ensure the angle of the panel is facing the sun at any given time. However, dust is the main problem that affects the efficiency of the solar panels. For instance in a study to find out the effect of dust on the effectiveness of the solar PV panels showed that dust reduced solar radiation by about 1% when the angle is tilted at 30 degrees (Kuchiki et.al, 2015).

Therefore, the maximum degradation is 4.7% over a period of three months (Schneider et.al, 2015). In another case, it was found out that rain and dust were tested on their effect on the effectiveness of the PVs. In days of no rain, the efficiency of the PV decreased by 0.2% due to the dust accumulations which were approximately 1.5 to 6.2% depending on the location of the arrays. An investigation on the on the monthly output in a dusty area such as Tehran shows that dust accumulation caused a decrease in efficiency by 60% as the increased amount of dust caused little access to the sunlight (Schneider et.al, 2015). The effectiveness of the photovoltaic solar panels is measured by the capability of solar panels to convert the sunlight into usable energy. Thus, it is essential to have the right panel depending on the intended use. The following equation is used to calculate the maximum efficiency;

Pn= VocIsc FF

Voc is the open-circuit voltage Isc is short Circuit current, FF is the fill factor, and N is the efficiency. The solar cell efficiencies are measured under the standard test condition (STC) whereby the temperature is 25 degrees Celsius and the irradiance are 1000W/m2 and the air mass is at 1,5. On the other hand, the array is tested using 12 modules while each module is made of monocrystalline Silicon CSUN (Nikolic & Vasic-Milovanovic, 2016). Therefore,

Characteristics

P max

P nominal

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