(L-R) Former RDP students Kyle Victor, Carson West and Nathan Crombie. (ASET)

By rdnewsNOW Staff

Capstone Project of the Year Award

Solar panel “Clean Machine” by former RDP students becomes finalist for provincial award

Sep 22, 2022 | 1:15 PM

Aware of the benefits of a clean energy source like solar power, a former team of Red Deer Polytechnic (RDP) engineering technology students sought to answer the question: how can you actually keep it clean?

Shedding some light on a solution for this problem, the team has been honoured as a provincial finalist for the Capstone Project of the Year Award by the Association of Science and Engineering Technology Professionals of Alberta’s (ASET).

ASET officials state that while solar panels are increasingly common as a climate-friendly, clean energy source, their efficiency decreases by as much as 50 per cent when they get dirty due to dust or grime.

They explain three types of systems currently exist for cleaning solar panels:

1. Manual labor: mainly used for residential set-ups with a small number of panels that can be cleaned in a few hours.
2. Robotic cleaners: commonly associated with solar farms, the cleaners are designed to run on a straight track of panels throughout the day without supervision. While deemed advantageous for large-scale operations, they, and their moving parts, typically require yearly maintenance and can be expensive in cost.
3. Driving cleaners: attached to human-driven machines, they necessitate the use of large volumes of water and costly manual labour.

DON'T WASTE IT

Lacombe encouraging residents to treat water as precious resource

1h ago

Ground School Training

New aviation career pathway elevates opportunities for students

11h ago

4-7 p.m. Wednesday

City to host downtown parking feedback session

13h ago

Former RDP engineering technology students Kyle Victor, Carson West and Nathan Crombie, therefore, developed a pneumatic air blast cleaning system that, they state, requires minimal maintenance, is cost-effective, simple to install, fully automated, needs no water supply, has few moving parts, can operate in any climate, is adaptable to any panel array geometry, and has the potential to be powered by the same solar panel system it is designed to clean.

In the former team’s prototype, one pneumatic air sprayer is attached on the top of the solar panel and another in the middle. An air compressor with tubing is connected to the sprayers. An Arduino kit, which is an open-source electronics platform based on software and hardware deemed easy-to-use, is programmed to run a timed sequence for each sprayer. When the process starts, the top sprayer will spray air for a few seconds. When the dust is cleared off the top half of the panel, the top sprayer shuts off and the middle sprayer turns on for a few seconds to carry the already moving dust off the rest of the panel.

(L-R) Former RDP students Kyle Victor, Carson West and Nathan Crombie and their solar panel “clean machine”. (ASET)

“Our team had two goals for this project. The first was to create a design applicable to both residential and industrial solar panel systems. The second was to ensure that it was cheaper and more efficient than cleaning systems currently available,” said former team member Victor. “Our system can clear off a solar panel in seconds unlike other systems where, depending on the location of the panel, that panel could be the last in the line waiting to be cleaned and may have spent hours operating at low efficiency.”

“The former Red Deer Polytechnic team must be commended for their clear-eyed approach to resolving a practical issue associated with solar energy,” said ASET Chief Executive Officer Barry Cavanaugh. “It represents a significant step forward in maximizing efficiency of an important clean energy source, and demonstrates the combination of practicality and innovation that characterizes the engineering technology profession.”

The former RDP team’s project is one of eight finalists named by ASET for the 2022 Capstone Project of the Year Award. The winning project is expected to be announced later this year.

The Award was established by ASET in 2017 in response, they say, to overwhelming member interest in back-to-school stories about Capstone projects undertaken by teams of engineering technology students from NAIT, SAIT, RDP and Lethbridge College as part of their end-of-program requirements.