The Impact of Sunlight Intensity and Outdoor Temperature on the Performance of Inorganic Solar Panels

In this work the impact of sunlight intensity and ambient temperature on the inorganic solar panels in winter climate (22 November 2015) at Sarwchawa, Kurdistan Region, Iraq was carried out. A maximum intensity of sunlight (106.25 klux) was reached at 12:00 PM. However, beyond 12:00 PM the intensity showed a non-monotonic change behavior. This was ascribed to the change of sun position, its orientation and the direction at which the surface of the panel is illuminated. Results showed that the increase of sunlight intensity has made Isc to increase, while that of the Voc remains relatively unchanged. The reason why Isc is more affected by the sunlight intensity was understood from the fact that charge carriers acquire enough kinetic energy to move towards their corresponding electrodes before they relapse or recombine together, while as Voc is mostly correlated to the energy gap. There was a trivial decrement of efficiency with the increase of temperature. This was where the FF showeda reverse trend of increment with the increase of temperature. Noteworthy, at the points where the fill factor was decreased the efficiency was increased and vice versa.