Impact of Soiling on PV Modules and Strings of Field-Exposed PV Systems

Effective evaluation of the performance loss due to soiling requires robust testing method. So far most of the soiling experiments were performed on small scale glasses in lab environment. This work presents a soiling experiment performed on field-exposed modules under operating condition. Three different level of soiling were tested. The results show that with severe soiling, the transmittance can be reduced by as high as 70%. IV curves were collected after applying each soiling layer, clearly shows the impact of various level of soiling.