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Jeremiah Rittenhouse, a doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering, will defend their dissertation titled “Vibration Modeling of Rectangular Plates and Application to Solar Cell Dust Mitigation.” Their advisor, Dr. Daniel Stutts, is an associate professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department. The dissertation abstract is provided below.

Many engineering structures can be modeled as rectangular plates, including solar cells. Carefully controlled vibration can be useful to solve an engineering problem, such as lunar dust accumulation on solar cells, which blocks light and reduces power generation. For this application, plate vibration at resonance is studied and used experimentally to eject lunar dust from a solar cell.

Paper I in this dissertation presents piezoelectric actuator placement on the inactive side of a solar cell to induce vibration dust mitigation from the active side of the cell. Three solar cell prototypes were created and tested for efficacy, resulting in an average of 49% of lost power reclaimed with up to 86% maximum power reclaimed after actuation. A prototype was cryogenically cycled without impedance spectrum degradation, and an energy reclamation case study result estimated 154 MJ/kg return on actuator mass cost over one year.

Papers II and III focus on the analytical modeling and experimental verification of the vibration of a rectangular plate having completely free boundaries. In Paper II, the plate free vibration is solved using the Galerkin method and the method of modal expansion is used to solve for the motion of the plate actuated by a point force at the center. The actuator armature mass is modeled using the receptance method. Good qualitative agreement was seen between mode shapes, and good quantitative agreement was observed between plate resonance frequencies. Single plate point coordinate frequency response functions were presented and compared for analytical, finite element, and experimental results.

Paper III Extends the analytical and experimental forced plate vibration work to include a different type of forcing: that induced by a single, rectangular piezoelectric actuator bonded to the plate at an arbitrary coordinate with the actuator edges aligned parallel to the plate edges. This work places the foundation from which smart model-informed design of piezoactuators for lunar dust mitigation may be explored.

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