This study scrutinizes the reliability and validity of existing analyses that focus on the impact of various environmental factors on a photovoltaic (PV) system’s performance. For the first time, four environmental factors (the accumulation of dust, water droplets, birds’ droppings, and partial shading conditions) affecting system performance are investigated, simultaneously, in one study. The results obtained from this investigation demonstrate that the accumulation of dust, shading, and bird fouling has a significant effect on PV current and voltage, and consequently, the harvested PV energy. ‘Shading’ had the strongest influence on the efficiency of the PV modules. It was found that increasing the area of shading on a PV module surface by a quarter, half, and three quarters resulted in a power reduction of 33.7%, 45.1%, and 92.6%, respectively. However, results pertaining to the impact of water droplets on the PV panel had an inverse effect, decreasing the temperature of the PV panel, which led to an increase in the potential difference and improved the power output by at least 5.6%. Moreover, dust accumulation reduced the power output by 8.80% and the efficiency by 11.86%, while birds fouling the PV module surface was found to reduce the PV system performance by about 7.4%.

An adaptive fuzzy logic (FL)-based new maximum power point (MPP) tracking (MPPT) methodology for controlling photovoltaic (PV) systems is proposed, designed, and implemented in this paper. The existing methods for implementing FL-based MPPTs lack for adaptivity with the operating point, which varies in wide range in practical PV systems with operating irradiance and ambient temperature. The new proposed adaptive FL-based MPPT (AFL-MPPT) algorithm is simple, accurate, and provides faster convergence to optimal operating point. The effectiveness and feasibility verifications of the proposed AFL-MPPT methodology are validated with considering various operating conditions at slow and fast change of solar radiation. In addition, the simplified implementation of the proposed algorithm is carried out using C-block in PSIM software environment, wherein the proposed algorithm and system are simulated. Additionally, experimental results are performed using a floating-point digital signal processing (DSP) controller (TMS320F28335) for verifying the feasibility of the proposed AFL-MPPT methodology. The results of simulations and experimental prototypes show great consistency and prove the capability of the new AFL-MPPT methodology to extract MPPT rapidly and precisely. The new proposed AFL-MPPT method achieves accurate output power of the PV system with smooth and low ripple. In addition, the new proposed AFL-MPPT method benefits fast dynamics and it reaches steady state within 0.01 s.

The prevalence of the use of mathematical software has dramatically influenced the evolution of differential equations. The use of these useful tools leads to faster advances in the presentation of numerical and analytical methods. This paper retrieves several soliton solutions to the fractional perturbed Schrödinger’s equation with Kerr and parabolic law nonlinearity, and local conformable derivative. The method used in this article, called the generalized exponential rational function method, also relies heavily on the use of symbolic software such as Maple. The considered model has prominent applications in water optical metamaterials. The method retrieves several exponential, hyperbolic, and trigonometric function solutions to the model. The numerical evolution of the obtained solutions is also exhibited. The resulted wide range of solutions derived from the method proves its effectiveness in solving the model under investigation. It is also recommended to use the technique used in this article to solve similar problems.