Modular design of a cylindrical cam assembly for solar-panel clean system

For the benefite of the earth and Human being, green and renewable energy such as wind, ocean current and solar power, become more and more important. For solar power, in addition to large scale solar power plants, there are thousends of stand-alone solar power generation devices used in public and residensial areas, including solar lights, solar signs, solar shelters and the like. The efficiency of solar pannel is significantly reduced by the dust attached on the surface. Therefore self-cleaning function is extremly important for solar panels especialy for the independent solar power generation units. For a innovative solar panel cleaning device that does not need electricity, wind-turbine can be used to drive a cylindrical cam and the cam transfomes the rotational movenment into leaner movement. In this system, the cam follower moves in the helical grooves cut on the periphery of a cylinder, and produce linear and oscillation movement. Because of the differences in solar penel dimension, it will be more expensive to order a customized cylindrical cam to fit in. Therefore, a modular cylindrical cam desgin is proposed in this report. The idea of modulized cam design is to design a cam unit with special length and match mechanism, which can be assembled at ease to abtain any total length, to fit any dimension of solar penal. These modular cam units can be made through plastic enjection molding process that will dramatically reduce the production cost and therefore made the innovative solar panel cleaning device more affordable.