An analytical model to study post-collision motion of dust particles and their interaction with solar panel surfaces

This paper presents an analytical model to study the motion of dust particle post-collision with a solar panel in a semi-arid climate of Gurugram, Haryana, India. The particle moves under the action of various governing forces following the second law of motion. The equations of motions result in a system of nonlinear simultaneous differential equation of second order, specifically designed for modeling complex dynamical systems. The proposed model was simulated using Runge–Kutta method of order 4 and was found that particle size, wind speed and direction play an important role in post-collision dynamics of the dust particle. Not only that, it was also observed that environmental factors like relative humidity also affect post-collision dynamics. In very humid conditions, due to the strong effect of liquid bridge forces, the dust particle after collision deposits on the panel as compared to dry panel, and the particles bounce off from the panel after collision. The results were validated by comparing them with those obtained using MATLAB’s ‘ode45’ solver under identical conditions. The data obtained from a 185.6 kWp ground-mounted solar power plant at Amity University Haryana, Gurugram, India, were used to establish a correlation between the observed phenomenon and derived results based on such conditions. All the results obtained clearly indicate that the proposed algorithm provides high accuracy.