Characterization of soiling on PV modules in the Atacama Desert Olivares, Douglas Ferrada, Pablo de Matos, Camila Marzo Rosa, Aitor Cabrera, Enrique Portillo, Carlos Llanos, Jaime Soiling PV modules Soil composition This work was supported in part by CORFO, in part by FONDECYT/CONICYT Project Number 3160190, in part by CONICYT/FONDAP/15110019 “Solar Energy Research Center” SERC-Chile and in part by the BMBF Solar Collaboration between Chile and Deutschland (Solar ChilD) project number 01DN14005. The authors acknowledge the support provided within these frameworks. The soling can negatively affect the performance of photovoltaic systems. We studied the species, which deposit on photovoltaic (PV) modules in northern Chile (Atacama Desert). The environmental conditions are the base for the interaction of dust particles and the module’s surfaces. We considered 4 locations for the study. We determined that the particle size of the dust to deposit on PV modules is smaller than 63 μm for all the selected sites. However, the morphology varies from place to place influencing optical response of the modules. After 4 months dust accumulation the transmittance of PV glass reduced by 55%. 2026-01-14T07:55:46Z 2026-01-14T07:55:46Z 2017 journal article Olivares, D., Ferrada, P., Matos, C. de, Marzo, A., Cabrera, E., Portillo, C., Llanos, J., 2017. Characterization of soiling on PV modules in the Atacama Desert. Energy Procedia 124, 547–553. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.egypro.2017.09.263 1876-6102 https://hdl.handle.net/10481/109639 10.1016/j.egypro.2017.09.263 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional Elsevier