The Impact of Cleaning Bird Drops for PV Power Increment: An Experimental Study in Dhaka, Bangladesh
摘要
Non-uniform shading causes significant power reduction in rooftop Photovoltaic (PV) systems. Bird drops are one of the key factors that cause non-uniform shading on the PV module. It is found that the output power can be significantly improved with regular cleaning of the PV module surface. In this paper, a water-based surface cleaning approach is applied on a 2 × 2 40 W photovoltaic array that contains bird-droppings, to investigate the improvement in panel output. The experiments were carried out for both clean and unclean conditions for seven cases. The results show a substantial increase in PV power output as a result of the cleaning procedure. Maximum power output was observed for case 6, providing an output of 35.2 W, while the percentage of power enhancement (PPE) for this case was 6.21%. Case 7 showed the highest level of PPE at 16.69%.