This research has designed and developed a smart photovoltaic panel cleaning robot. It has a working mechanism that combines a robot side movement with rails and a cleaning brush up-down movement with the sling. The smart robot uses an Arduino UNO microcontroller to control the main mechanisms, such as a cleaning brush, a water spray pump, and whole robot movement systems. Users can operate the robot in both automatic and manual control modes via mobile phone by using Blynk application connected via Node MCU ESP8266. The functional test results show the smart robot cleans photovoltaic panels with a tilt angle of 15 degrees at a rate of approximately 2.19 minutes per square meter using an average power consumption of approximately 1.40 watt-hours per square meter. A case study was given on the smart robot cleaning solar panels with three levels of dirtiness: very dirty, medium, and low. During the period of similar light intensity, the test results showed relatively good cleaning performance of the robot, considering the power generated by the solar panels before and after cleaning. All three levels were approximately the same.
Keywords
Cleaning robots, Solar cells, Smart systems, Internet of things
THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL TECHNOLOGY
Published by : Research and Academic Supports Division College of Industrial Technology, King Mongkut’s University of Technology North Bangkok Contributions welcome at : http://j.cit.kmutnb.ac.th/en/
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