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Solar power is mainly harnessed from photovoltaic (PV) panels which are arranged in multiple arrays in a solar farm or solar system. Though, power generation from PV solar system is characterised by uncertain efficiency, many countries with high insolation prefer solar as an alternative way of generating clean energy. However, the efficiency of energy generated from PV panels is affected by the accumulation of dust and debris, even on one panel in an array. This condition leads to the need for regular cleaning of the surface of PV panels. Current labour-based cleaning methods for photovoltaic arrays are costly in time, water and energy usage as well as lacking in automation capabilities. To overcome this problem, a fully automatic solar panel cleaning system with/without water is proposed. Hence, in this paper, the design of a robot for automated cleaning of the surface of PV panel is presented. The design utilizes an Arduino controller system to control the robot movement during the cleaning process. In addition, it is equipped with two rough sponge and a water pump system that can be used to clean dust or debris found on PV panel surfaces. The efficiency of the PV panels before and after the cleaning process is also observed. The result shows that the developed solar panel cleaning robot is able to clean the panel effectively and increase back the output current as well as the maximum power of the panel by 50%, after the dust on the PV panel is cleaned.

Metallic nature of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) were modified using low frequency (50Hz) non-equilibrium plasma, which was generated separately by oxygen and nitrogen dielectric barrier discharge plasma (DBD) at atmospheric pressure. Its potential to behave as semiconducting behavior mainly in diode application was studied. The surface structure and electrical properties changes before and after treatments were analyzed by using X-Ray Photoelectron (XPS), and IV measurement (a two-point probe). The current-voltage (I-V) characteristics shows that Au/MWCNT-N 2 (12kV)/Al shows good rectifying behavior. This showed that, the nitrogen-containing group can modify the metallic nature of MWCNTs to semiconducting behavior. Since the I-V curves for Au/MWCNTs-N 2 (12kV)/Al has rectifying behavior similar to Schottky diode, the electronic parameters such as ideality factor, barrier height and series resistance of the device were extracted by using three methods and give good agreement between them.

In this work, a set of experiments has been conducted using arc discharge Methane decomposition attempting to obtain carbonaceous materials (C-strands) formed between graphite electrodes. The current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of the fabricated C-strands have been investigated in the presence and absence of two different gases, NO2 and CO2. The results reveal that the current passing through the carbon films increases when the concentrations of gases are increased from 200 to 800 ppm. This phenomenon is a result of conductance changes and can be employed in sensing applications such as gas sensors.