Research Updates and Progress

The John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics & Science InvenTeam has been working on finalizing the design for a solar panel cleaner, was interviewed by Fox News, talked with a solar panel expert from the Massachusetts  Audubon Society, and debated possible microcontrollers to use in the device. Here is the breakdown from our programmers and young engineers.

Fox News:
Two of our InvenTeam members, along with the Lemelson-MIT Program's Executive Director, Joshua Schuler, were interviewed by Fox25 News in October about the Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam initiative. Our representatives, Zhiyi and Faria, described the experience as “exciting, interesting, and nerve-racking to be on live television.”

Mass Audubon:
As a team we took a field trip to the Massachusetts Audubon Nature Center to look at their solar panels. They have a combination of arrays of free standing solar panels and solar shingles on the roof of their buildings. While we were there, we learned about how they use both solar energy and heat pumps to fully meet the energy needs of the Nature Center. We also found out that they do not clean their solar panels and do not remove the snow. They let the weather and gravity do the work for them. We did receive a broken solar shingle from their roof and have used that for testing purposes.

Programming:
The programming team debated between using Raspberry Pi or Arduino for the microcontroller system. The team chose to move forward with the Arduino. Team members then used the Arduino and designed a circuit to measure the output of a small solar panel. 

Mechanical:
The mechanical team decided on three designs of cleaning systems that they wanted to test out. They involved a compressed air system, a squeegee system, and a pressurized water system. This month they tested the most popular design: the compressed air. A concern we had about using compressed air was a possible “sand blasting” of the solar panels, therefore we tested to see if blasting air on the solar panel would cause scratches. We obtained a compressor with a maximum psi of 120, hooked it up to five air tanks and placed a pressure gauge and valve in the system to control the pressure. We started at a low pressure and then incrementally increased the pressure to observe the effect on the panel surface.