Ariel Wilcox

Ariel Wilcox

Biography

Wilcox is an Honors Mechanical Engineering student with an Aerospace
concentration and a minor in Applied Mathematics at North Carolina Agricultural & Technical
State University. She is from Woodbridge, VA, and is a Future of STEM Scholars’ Initiative
(FOSSI) Scholar and a Tome Scholar. She completed a mechanical engineering co-op at
LyondellBasell, where her projects focused on flow-accelerated corrosion within the chemical
plant. Ariel has completed two leadership programs; Leadership in Engineers Acceleration
Program (Year 1) and the Global Engineering Leadership Program, which culminated in a
study abroad trip. She is an active leader in the SAE Aero Design team, contributing to
experimentation with flight configurations. Ariel’s research contributed to the effort to explore
the effects of wind-driven dust resuspension, where she designed and fabricated several
components of a wind-tunnel experiment, led the setup, verification, and take-down procedure,
and analyzed the resulting force data for trends.

Fabrication Methods for Wind-tunnel Testing Solar Panel Analogs
Ariel Wilcox1,2, Stewart Isaacs2 and Wesley Harris2
1Department of Mechanical Engineering, North Carolina Agricultural & Technical
State University
2Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Solar power is a widely used, sustainable energy harvesting method. However, photovoltaic
(PV) panels, or solar panels, experience significant power loss due to a phenomenon called
dust soiling, where dust adheres to the solar panel’s surface. The overarching project seeks to
explore panel geometry to passively mitigate dust soiling. The primary objective of the MIT
Summer Research project is to enhance and expedite wind-tunnel testing procedures related to
dust soiling on solar panels. Here we show methods for developing components and protocols
to improve the testing capability of an existing wind-tunnel experiment. The test articles,
which were designed to imitate potential solar panel geometries, were refabricated using a hot
wire and a laser cutter, and assembled with epoxy. Custom attachments were developed for the
test article, eliminating an extra rotational degree of freedom. Three verification procedures
were implemented to ensure that the test article was aligned with the wind tunnel and all
measurement devices. These methods allowed us to complete over 60 trials across 13 test
orientations. The new testing materials and resulting datasets can be leveraged to inform future
dust soiling experiments.