A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions reports that small dye-sensitised solar modules kept water-level loggers running at nine monitoring bores for fourteen months, with or without a self-cleaning coating on the glass.
A fourteen-month field trial finds a self-cleaning coating helps most beside an unsealed road and is needed at none of nine bores
A water-level logger at the top of a monitoring bore can be run from a pane of glass about the size of a hand, and it turns out not to matter a great deal whether anybody keeps the glass clean. That is the result set out in A Bore Runs on Very Little: Dye-Sensitised Titania Mini-Modules and a Self-Cleaning Cover Glass on Nine Monitoring Bores, a research poster by Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, both of the School of Underlying Conditions.
Most of what a bore asks of the people who look after it is that they turn up. We have been glad to find one thing it can see to for itself, and we shall go on turning up regardless.
— Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, School of Underlying Conditions
Each of the nine bores was given two modules, alike except for a coating fired onto the glass of one, and neither was touched again for fourteen months. The coated glass came out ahead at eight bores, and furthest ahead where a road ran closest. The uncoated glass, at its dustiest, still supplied one and a half times what the logger required, and no reading was lost for want of power.
The University is glad of work whose principal finding is that an instrument went on working, and regards a margin established in the field as a margin worth having. Dr Obiora said the dust “was on the modules some weeks before it was in my notebook, which is the wrong order for a soil surveyor, and has been put right”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.vyej86.