IMPROVED PHOTOVOLTAIC POWERED SYSTEMS WITH DUST MITIGATION TECHNOLOGY FOR FUTURE LUNAR AND MARTIAN MISSIONS

摘要

The dust mitigation technologies are critical fordeployment of photovoltaic (PV) arrays in remote, dustyatmospheres such as the surface of Moon and Mars. Asdust collects on PV cells, the amount of light hitting thesurface is decreased, thus decreasing the overall poweroutput. It is not practicable to use moving parts in highdustareas due to the damaging effects dust has on joints.Electrodynamic dust-removal (EDS) screens are idealtechnologies for these conditions, as they have nomoving parts. We developed an experimental systemthat incorporates a transparent EDS with a PV array asits power source allowing us to study the total efficiencyof GaAs and Mono and Multi Si PV cells. In order togive a qualitative and quantitative analysis ofperformance measures of solar cells with the integratedEDS technologies, prototypes were developed andtested under earth ambient conditions.