Premium
An investigation of the key parameters for predicting PV soiling losses
Author(s) -
Micheli Leonardo,
Muller Matthew
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
progress in photovoltaics: research and applications
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.286
H-Index - 131
eISSN - 1099-159X
pISSN - 1062-7995
DOI - 10.1002/pip.2860
Subject(s) - environmental science , precipitation , meteorology , particulates , atmospheric sciences , statistics , mathematics , geography , geology , chemistry , organic chemistry
One hundred and two environmental and meteorological parameters have been investigated and compared with the performance of 20 soiling stations installed in the USA, in order to determine their ability to predict the soiling losses occurring on PV systems. The results of this investigation showed that the annual average of the daily mean particulate matter values recorded by monitoring stations deployed near the PV systems are the best soiling predictors, with coefficients of determination ( R 2 ) as high as 0.82. The precipitation pattern was also found to be relevant: among the different meteorological parameters, the average length of dry periods had the best correlation with the soiling ratio. A preliminary investigation of two‐variable regressions was attempted and resulted in an adjusted R 2 of 0.90 when a combination of PM 2.5 and a binary classification for the average length of the dry period was introduced. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.