NOMADD, developed at King Abdullah University for Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia, stands for The NO-water Mechanical Automated Dusting Device.
Solar farms in the deserts of Saudi Arabia can experience 60% energy yield losses resulting from sand storms. Keeping solar panels clean can be quite a time intensive and expensive exercise. The longer the dust sits on the panels, the more energy is lost and the greater the risk of particles adhering to or scratching the solar panel glass.
The use of water in cleaning also poses some challenges as it often has to be transported in; or if groundwater is used, it needs to be desalinated.
NOMADD was specifically designed for cleaning panels in these harsh desert conditions.
The fully automated system works with fixed arrays and has just four user-serviceable moving parts. It can remove 99.6% of dust with a daily clean and not a drop of water is used.
Its makers claim a 3 year payback period against all captured costs of manual cleaning.
The commercial model will be able to clean arrays up to 150 metres long and up to 3 metres wide. On a 3 m width array, NOMADD travels at 0.25 m/s and can clean 90m2 per minute. While operating, NOMADD’s power requirements are 250 watts. The commercial model will incorporate on-board batteries that are recharged when the NOMADD isn’t operating.
During testing, several thousand passes with the NOMADD brush system resulted in “essentially zero scratching or service degradation in that time on both mono crystal and thin-film panels”.
A single operator can observe the operation of each NOMADD device in real-time through remote sensor viewing and network communications.
Georg Eitelhuber, the founder of NOMADD, was a recipient of the Middle East Solar Industry Association’s Solar Pioneers 2014 award.
Other solar panel cleaning robots we’ve covered in the past include the Ecoppia E4 and SolarBrush
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