Design of Automatic Solar Cleaning System

Solar panels are devices in a solar power generation system that utilize solar energy to produce electrical energy. The efficiency of solar panels is affected by the absorption of sunlight intensity. Dust that sticks to the surface of the solar panels causes a decrease in performance of 5-15%. Although there are various cleaning methods, most of them are done manually with the potential for work accidents due to the location of the solar panels at a height. Therefore, this study developed an automatic cleaning system with wet cleaning method to overcome this problem. Experiments on the designed device show that the energy consumption of the cleaning system is 5.4131 kWh/year, with a cleaning frequency of 2 times per year. Solar panel energy production without using an automatic cleaning system is 59.55% lower than solar panel energy production using an automatic cleaning system. This shows that the automatic cleaning system has important role to optimizing the performance of solar panels so that they can produce energy optimally