Abstract
Solar-generated energy has been growing rapidly over the past several years, especially in the form of solar farms. Solar farms are places where many solar panels are installed on flat, vacant land. Unfortunately for solar energy producers, the same sunny, dry climate that makes a location ideal for solar also makes it more susceptible to generating dust. It does not take long for airborne particulates to hinder solar energy production. Similar challenge is even more severe for outer space environment such as lunar surface. There are some new technologies are being developed to help solve the problem of dust and grime in this industry. This includes solar power cleaning robots and self-cleaning solar panels. However, many cleaning technologies are not fully developed yet and can be expensive. Even as more progress is made, dust prevention will always play an important role in maximizing solar power. Regions prone to dust benefit from mitigating the problem from the start. Once created, dust is challenging and often costly to manage. While there are products designed to extract, collect, and clean dust in various industries, it is risky to rely on only reactive solutions. In this study, the student team proposed and developed an electrostatic cleaning system (ECS) using carbon nanotubes (CNT) integrated with a negatively ionized Thunderon brush (NITB) was developed to mitigate small-sized lunar dust particles with diameters ranging from 0.04 μm to 35 μm, and the mean and median size of 7 μm and 5 μm, respectively. NITB was used manually to remove particles from areas where the ECS failed to mitigate the lunar simulant. The acquired data demonstrated that the developed system removed over 94–98% of the lunar dust particles. This research then serves to rectifies the efficiencies of the proposed approach and test new methods of improving the efficiency compared with other methods.
