Influence of Dust in Solar Cells Used for Measuring Solar Radiation

Abstract

The photovoltaic cells (PV) are commonly used as global radiation measurement device, even though when it has been proved that there are significant differences with respect to using pyranometers. The dirt deposited on the surface of the PV is one of the most influential factors in the measurement of the solar radiation. In this work we have made experimental measurements with four identical cells, two cleans and two dirties with different soil density (0.2 g/m2, 0.4 g/m2, 0.8 g/m2, 1.2 g/m2 and 1.5 g/m2) and different size particles (< 125 μm) comparing the results and obtaining a correlation between the density of the dust and the difference between the measured irradiance for clean and dirty cells for each particle size.