Automated Solar Panel Cleaning System

Automated Solar Panel Cleaning System

Author Name : Prof. Tushar Edake, Mr. Shahaji Jadhav, Mr. Rajesh Sawant, Mr. Prince Yadav, Ms. Megha Shinde

ABSTRACT

Most of the applications nowadays like heating water, agriculture and industrial applications use the solar panels as an electrical power source instead of relying on the generators or the ordinary sources for electricity. The most important part of these systems is the solar panel where the solar energy is converted to heat for water heating or converted to electricity for the others. There are many types of the solar panels. In the countries those have dusty environment accumulation of dust on the solar panels leads to reduction of the transmittance of the panel. Solar plants in some of the middle-east countries like the solar desalination plant of Abu Dhabi suffer from the deposition of dust on its solar plates. The effect of the accumulated dust will be reduced with the increasing of tilt angle, since the tilt angle will affect the exposure time to the sunlight also. But the best way to eliminate the effect of the accumulated dust on the solar panels is to clean the panels. Cleaning the solar panels is normally by washing which is tedious and cumbersome and also expensive in terms of the labor involved and time. In practice cleaning of solar panels should be frequently done which makes the process more expensive. The cleaning done in Solar farm is weekly or monthly basis and because of that around 35% off power loss occurred. The existing method of cleaning the solar panels by robots is perfectly fine but the problem is this system is not hundred percent effective. This system is good enough to remove dust but it cannot remove the hard stains like bird shit. Also cleaning this farm by water on daily basis is very costly. Hence, the combination of wet and dry cleaning is introduced here which goes very effective. The designing of machine consists of mainly nozzles and moving parts. So here the physical prototype is fabricated for justifying the design with practical model. The practical cleaning is observed and results are shown for increasing the efficiency of panel sets.

Key words: Solar Panels, Wet, Dry, Nozzles, Dust, Expensive.