In this paper, the impact of dust deposition on solar photovoltaic (PV) panels was examined, using experimental and machine learning (ML) approaches for different sizes of dust pollutants. The experimental investigation was performed using five different sizes of dust pollutants with a deposition density of 33.48 g/m2 on the panel surface. It has been noted that the zero-resistance current of the PV panel is reduced by up to 49.01% due to the presence of small-size particles and 15.68% for large-size (ranging from 600 µ to 850 µ). In addition, a significant reduction of nearly 40% in sunlight penetration into the PV panel surface was observed due to the deposition of a smaller size of dust pollutants compared to the larger size. Subsequently, different ML regression models, namely support vector machine (SVMR), multiple linear (MLR) and Gaussian (GR), were considered and compared to predict the output power of solar PV panels under the varied size of dust deposition. The outcomes of the ML approach showed that the SVMR algorithms provide optimal performance with MAE, MSE and R2 values of 0.1589, 0.0328 and 0.9919, respectively; while GR had the worst performance. The predicted output power values are in good agreement with the experimental values, showing that the proposed ML approaches are suitable for predicting the output power in any harsh and dusty environment.
Keywords: Gaussian regression; PV panel; dust size; machine learning; output power; support vector machine regression.