Experimental Investigation of SiO2 Coating on the Performance of Solar Panel

Abstract

Sun is source of enormous and infinite source of renewable energy. This energy is continuously available at free of cost. Use of this clean energy for the purpose like Power generation, water desalination, drying is need of hour. Solar energy can be effectively used for the generation of electricity either by photovoltaic or concentrated solar power in last few decades. The main challenge with this is the heavy loss of heat during this conversion. Researchers have made efforts to reduce this loss so as to increase efficiency of solar panels.

In this paper, the effect of SiO2(Sol-gel method) coating on the performance of multicrystaline Solar panel has been examined. Multiple Solar Panels with different coatings at same orientation, inclination, location has been tested for analyzing improvement in performance. For the analysis of performance of Solar Panel, hourly readings of Voltage and Current have been taken with the help of Multimeter.Hourly trends in energy generation, efficiency has been analysed.