{"id":5123,"date":"2026-05-13T15:08:18","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T19:08:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/?post_type=profiles&#038;p=5123"},"modified":"2026-10-09T11:17:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-09T15:17:29","slug":"copernic-mensah","status":"publish","type":"profiles","link":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/profiles\/copernic-mensah\/","title":{"rendered":"Copernic Mensah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-is-layout-8f761849 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\" style=\"flex-basis:100%\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-group is-nowrap is-layout-flex wp-container-core-group-is-layout-8f761849 wp-block-group-is-layout-flex\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2026\/05\/Mensah-Copernic-e1791558931656.jpg\" alt=\"Mensah, Copernic\" class=\"wp-image-5614\" \/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-container-content-69bc4bdf wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>MIT Department: <\/strong><br>Aeronautics and Astronautics<br><br><strong>Faculty Mentor<\/strong>: <br>Wesley Harris<br><br><strong>Research Supervisor: <\/strong><br>Stewart Isaacs<br><br><strong>Undergraduate Institution:<\/strong><br>Hampton University<strong><br><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<h4 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Biography<\/strong><\/h4>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Copernic Mensah is a computer science undergraduate at Hampton University, working toward a Ph.D. During the school year, he researches nuclear fusion at The Center for Fusion Research and Training, modeling Poincar\u00e9 plots and experimenting with stellarator coil-winding. He is currently interning at MIT&#8217;s Hypersonics Research Laboratory, working under Dr. Wesley Harris and Dr. Stewart Isaacs to study shape-enhanced aerodynamic dust removal from solar panels in West Africa. Before that, he served as a Quantitative Developer Intern at the Nwagbara Group LLC, maintaining high-frequency trading engines in Rust. At the Center for Applied Biomechanics and Rehabilitation, he designed a 2D robotic hand exoskeleton game for stroke patients. He received recognition at NASA&#8217;s Solar Energy and Science Gateways hackathons for his work in astronaut augmented reality and LLM data portals for reproducible science. Across every difficult project, Copernic&#8217;s approach remains the same: understand the problem analytically, then solve it numerically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center wp-block-paragraph\"><br><strong>Uniform Dust Deposition and Orientation Detection for Wind Tunnel<br>Testing of Photovoltaics<br><\/strong>Copernic Mensah<sup>1<\/sup>, Dr. Stewart Isaacs<sup>2<\/sup>, Dr. Wesley Harris<sup>2<\/sup><br><sup>1<\/sup>Department of Computer Science, Hampton University<br><sup>2<\/sup>Department of Astronautics and Aeronautics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-left wp-block-paragraph\"><br>Dust accumulation on photovoltaic (PV) module surfaces limits power generation. While manual, automatic, and semi-automatic cleaning strategies exist to remove surface dust, no passive cleaning strategy currently exists. This project investigates passive dust removal through wind tunnel experimentation at 10 m\/s on analog PV panels, testing three angles of attack (0\u00b0, 15\u00b0, and 30\u00b0). We first developed a standardized dust deposition method by comparing four candidate techniques\u2014manual pile-and-push, manual mesh tapping, automatic mesh sifting, and manual mesh shaking\u2014evaluated on deposition time, evenness, particle uniformity, and spread. Pile-and-push was fastest (1:30) but produced uneven coverage, corner gaps, and dust clumping. Mesh tapping (1:47) achieved even, uniform coverage but required strenuous, repeated effort, making it impractical across many trials. Automatic mesh sifting (2:30) produced even, uniform, fine, gap-free coverage without manual strain and was selected as our standardized deposition procedure. Alongside this work, we developed a ChArUco board-based computer vision model that uses corner detection and PnP (Perspective-n-Point) pose estimation to detect panel tilt. The findings of this work aim to improve PV module performance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":5614,"template":"","profile_category":[25],"class_list":["post-5123","profiles","type-profiles","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","profile_category-2026-interns"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/5123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profiles"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/5123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6040,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiles\/5123\/revisions\/6040"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"profile_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oge.mit.edu\/msrp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile_category?post=5123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}