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Reminds me of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi. Deserts kick up so much dust, I wonder how often they have to clean the mirrors.
by JDDunn9 11y ago
Reminds me of Masdar City in Abu Dhabi.
Deserts kick up so much dust, I wonder how often they have to clean the mirrors.
- nnethercote 11y ago> Deserts kick up so much dust, I wonder how often they have to clean the mirrors. Good job for phrasing that as a neutral question, rather than something negative and assuming like "This couldn't possibly work, don't they know that deserts are dusty?"
- TeMPOraL 11y agoWhatever trick they do have or will figure out, it could be pretty useful for long-duration Mars missions.
- zubspace 11y agoThis could be a perfect scenario where drones make sense. But I don't know about mars... http://www.aerialpower.com/ http://www.aerialpower.com/
- reustle 11y agoDrones to clean the stationary solar panel glass? Are you joking? Install something like a windshield wiper and be done with it.
- ceejayoz 11y agoIIRC, wipers were evaluated and decided against for Mars rover solar panels because of the risk of scratches to the glass. I'd imagine the same applies here.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoBlowers then? Drones, especially flying ones, seem to be a colossal waste of energy here. That is, on Earth; on Mars it'll be hard to make such drone, because the air is much, much less dense. AFAIR NASA only figured out how to fly a long-distance recon plane there.
- aldel 11y agoLooks like a problem that can be "slightly" easier to fix here on earth, doesn't it? :-) On a related note, dust cleaning is one of the most difficult technical challenges for the high speed train currently being built to Mecca.
- artmageddon 11y agoNormally I'd agree, but with drones, no one needs to physically go out to the site(and having spent a lot of time in the Sahara it gets freakin' hot) to clean the glass, and you don't need to worry about having to maintain the mechanical parts needed for cleaning the glass on each panel. Plus, if there's some other problem, a drone will let you visually see it.
- ceejayoz 11y agoA hair dryer and a $10 cell phone camera attached to each panel is likely more cost effective than a fleet of drones.
- pyre 11y agoDepends on how often a person needs to go out and service those parts. With a drone fleet, they can be serviced from a central location. If one dies in the field, then they can replace it with a backup while someone goes out to retrieve the downed drone. Cost-wise I have no idea which side this works in favour of, but the idea that "a hair dryer and a $10 cellphone camera" is cheap so therefore better ignores things like maintenance costs. Having a person constantly going out into the field to service these parts will definitely cost more than the parts themselves (and is not a cost you can ignore).
- AtlasLion 11y agoHere is a video from 2010 (World Bank) that shows the cleaning process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y
- TeMPOraL 11y agoI think you're seriously overestimating the reliability of drones and at the same time underestimating the reliability of hair dryers. Also, ignoring for a moment that no commonly known type of drones would work in the martian atmosphere, stationary solutions have much more leeway for building it to NASA standards - better coils, more solder at joints, etc. I'm willing to bet that a simple blower hooked up to the energy storage and a timer mechanism could work without intervention for a hundred years or more - if made in the way they did it 40-80 years ago, as opposed to today, where all consumer devices are as crap as producers can get away with, on purpose. Contrast with (hypothetical) service drones, when every gram of additional reliability is cutting into the flight time. As for what kind of drones could work on Mars... well, leafblowers on service rails or on wheels are the only things I can come up with that make sense. Magnetic field flying is probably too energy-intensive, and quadcopters won't work in martian atmosphere. EDIT: I think the Sahara and Mars threads got mixed up...
- Shivetya 11y agosurely there are some surface treatments that they can use to minimize the need. I would be just as worried about the abrasiveness of wind driven sand.
- raverbashing 11y agoWind abrasion probably makes the mirrors more shiny
- threeseed 11y agoGiven that they are trying to stimulate local economies around the plants I would imagine they see this as a feature.
- Gravityloss 11y agoYeah, have some people gently brush them after dust events.
- AtlasLion 11y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y
- Pxtl 11y agoExactly. Send a guy out with a big janitor's push-broom in the evening.
- Keyframe 11y agoMaybe ultrasonic vibration could be used? I don't know if it can handle large particles/amount of dust or how it would affect wildlife.
- AtlasLion 11y agothey use rotating brushes car wash style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpZA6TMg04Y
- dzhiurgis 11y agoWell the panels are tracking the sun, so it would make sense to build in a wiper that utilises same mechanical motion. Possibly even use condensation - in the precise time of night at dew point, rotate the panel to a morning position.
- Luc 11y agoI don't know about cleaning but the desert sand seems to have little effect on the mirrors: "Regarding the irreversible degradation on relative specular reflectivity of exposed mirrors on natural aging site, relative low loss of about 0.4%, on average, was recorded after more than 360 days of exposure. This low degradation can be related to the low wind speed on the region." Surface wear damage of glass solar mirrors in Moroccan desert environment: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266078057_Surface_wear_damage_of_glass_solar_mirrors_in_Moroccan_desert_environment http://www.researchgate.net/publication/266078057_Surface_we...