Cleaning Solar Panels Using the Travelling Wave Dielectrophoresis Method

Abstract

Once installed, photovoltaic panels tend to be forgotten, and covered with a thin layer of dust due to bad weather and pollution. To this can be added bird droppings, pollen, dead leaves or dead insects. All of these elements can have a long-term impact on the performance of the panels because they are likely to compromise the uptake of the sun’s rays. Our work is essentially based on the removal of impurities deposited on the solar panels by introducing mobile wave conveyors where travelling-wave dielectrophoretic forces move the materials. In this paper, we studied the displacement of millimetric and nanometric size particles using three-phase and two-phase conveyors that are connected to the virtual instrument to follow the speed of displacement and we obtained good results or all the particles were moving off conveyors. The use of the two conveyors showed that the two-phase conveyor is more advantageous than the three-phase economy side in equipment. Both factors (voltage and frequency) are important for mobile wave creation, hence the ease of movement of particles. The advantage of this technology lies in the fact that the transport of the particles is ensured by the forces of the electric field.