Smart solar photovoltaic panel cleaning system

Abstract

With the increasing demand for renewable energy, solar photovoltaic technology is being a topic of concern. However, due to the accumulation of dust and dirt over the panel surface, the performance of the photovoltaic system degrades to a noticeable number. To address this issue: a fully automated, cost worthy and efficient system needs to be invented. This paper presents the design and fabrication process of a prototype able to clean the panel surface. The prototype of this system comprises of a cleaning robot and a cloud interface: the cleaning robot is mobile and able to clean the entire solar array back and forth, with its separately driven cleaning rotatory brush; whereas, the cloud interface is a human-machine interface featuring the distant monitoring and control of the robot. Additionally, to notify the performance of distantly placed solar farm, a sensing unit consisting of sensors was added to this system. Furthermore, to add an automatic cleaning feature, a month-long data of totally clean and dusty panel was processed with regression analysis, and the developed regression model was programmed into the sensing unit. The sensing unit added with the regression model is named as an autonomous unit, as it predicts the suitable time for cleaning action. According to the system evaluation done on a demonstration PV module, it was found that the designed system can clean dry dust accumulated over the panel’s surface. Moreover, by attaching the metal rail tracks on a long solar array, the system seems to be implementable on a large scale solar farm.