Design and development of cleaning solar plants robots

Abstract

The development of an automatic and standalone cleaning system for solar PV panels is discussed in this paper. To ensure the cleaning procedure is profitable, the created system has a dust sensor that can detect a 5% reduction in power in the solar panel’s power output when it is clean compared to when it is dusty. The created system also enables wireless communication between the user and the robot using an Android application and the HC-06 Bluetooth module, through the numerous tests on an exterior test bench. The electrical and thermal experimental test results clearly demonstrate the developed robot’s ability to remove dust, but the experiment also demonstrates that cleaning the PV module increases conversion efficiency from 12.16% for a dusty panel to 13.72% for a cleaned panel under conditions of 730 W/m2 of solar radiation. Thermal camera testing, on the other hand, reveals that a dusty PV module with even dust distribution increases in temperature by about 4.6°C, while a dusty PV module with non-uniform distribution increases in temperature by over 10°C. The performance of the PV module can be improved to assure longevity in a dusty environment at a very low cost, according to an economic study of the development and maintenance of the developed robot.