The I–V characteristics of solar cell under the marine environment: Experimental research

Solar cell is the core component of photovoltaic (PV) system on converting the solar radiation to electrical energy. Besides the solar irradiation and cell temperature, other environmental factors can actually affect the transient power output characteristic of solar cell located at the different district, such as humidity, wind velocity, shadow and dust, etc. Compared with the terrestrial environment, the marine environment is more severe and complicate, uncovering the cell's I–V characteristic is the key point not only for calculating the energy conversion efficiency of integrated PV system, but also for evaluating reliability assessment from the view point of long-term utilization. In this paper, a series of comparative experiments are conducted to present the I–V characteristics of solar module when covered by the rainwater, seawater and salt particles layer respectively. The artificial illuminant with its intensity varying between 550 and 900 W/m2 is used to simulate the solar radiation in different weather condition. To reduce the experimental error, all the voltage and current data are processed by the method of curve fitting, and translated to the standard test condition based on the experiment and numerical simulation. It is shown that the I–V characteristics of solar cell is influenced when the surface of cover glass is covered by the transparent liquid and solid particles respectively, the energy conversion efficiency of solar cell that achieved in the comparative experiments involving the liquid factor is relatively higher than that of solid particle layer. The result is equivalent to changing the solar irradiation intensity and cell's temperature with a certain rate simultaneously, but the mechanisms are classified in two different perspectives.