Journal of Solar Energy Research
Volume:4 Issue: 2, Spring 2019

The rapid industrialization and growth of the world’s human population have resulted in an unprecedented increase in the demand for energy, in particular, electricity. Depletion of fossil fuels and the impacts of global warming have caused widespread attention using Renewable Energy Resources (RESs), especially solar energy. This paper provides a practical method for the technical feasibility study for the construction of a Stand-Alone Photovoltaic (SAPV) system with a capacity of 863 Wp. Solar module, battery, DC/AC pure sine wave power inverter, and the charge controller are the main components of this PV system design. Choosing optimal capacity and arrangement increase the plant’s efficiency and reduces the overall system costs. In this method, according to the geographical location and type of site construction, e.g., on the ceiling of the footbridge, shadow analysis, and the calculations regards to the number of solar modules and their optimal angles are performed. This off-grid PV system is designed for the AC loads. PVSyst software is used for the system analysis, and the simulation results show the performance of the designed system.

Perturbation of diminutive solar irradiance and extreme semiconductor temperature on the responsive; output current and output voltage shows the stimulus effect of diminutive solar irradiance and extreme semiconductor temperature on the responsive. This could be adduced by carrying out direct and relative perturbation of the responsive with respect to diminutive solar irradiance and extreme semiconductor temperature. The upshot from the perturbation of the output current and output voltage reveals that output current is strongly influenced by the perturbation of diminutive solar irradiance whereas the output voltage is intensely influenced by the perturbation of extreme semiconductor temperature. Analytically, crystalline and thin film semiconductors proved to be rugged under the extreme semiconductor temperature and diminutive solar irradiance sequel to appreciable magnitude of their output current and output voltage gradients; 0.085060718 A/K, 0.044481542 V/K, 0.006285375 Am2/W and 3.504405002 Vm2/W, respectively. Furthermore, the relative perturbation of output current and output voltage gave rise to important thermal characteristics of the fluid surrounding the semiconductors investigated (crystalline; mono-c-Si and poly-c-Si, and thin films; copper indium diselenide and cadmium telluride); the internal conductance (convective and radiative heat transfer coefficients) and their corresponding thermal resistance (series and parallel) are the end products of perturbation rather than the complex classical correlation. These results provide a short cut and reliable means of establishing the thermal characteristics of fluid pocket surrounding the semiconductor, which are very useful for the performance analysis of the photovoltaic systems.

This research develops and analyzes three combinations of a solar driven cascade organic Rankine cycle (CORC) with ejector refrigeration loop (ERL) to produce power and liquefied natural gas (LNG) using exergy, exergoeconomic and exergoenvironmental concepts. In Case I, the extracted streams from turbines are used as ejectors primary fluids, in Case II, the ejector in high temperature (HT) loop is inserted after turbine and in Case III both ejectors are installed before the turbines. A comparative study is conducted to evaluate the performances of the proposed layouts. The simulation results demonstrate that Case III gives the lowest total product cost rate of 78.372 $/h and Case II causes the maximum energy and exergy efficiencies of 14.3% and 7.101%, respectively. Moreover, in this layout, the cost and environmental impact (EI) per exergy unit of LNG are improved by about 0.003 $/GJ and 17 mPts/GJ, respectively in relation to Case I. Finally, the ultimate solution of Case II as the best layout is ascertained and compared with Case I by applying Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II) and three decision makers, namely LINMAP, TOPSIS and Shannon Entropy. According to the optimization results, the maximum improvements in product cost rates are achieved within 1.2% and 2.2% for cases I and II, respectively and the maximum reduction in EI rate for Case I is obtained within 1.05% through LINMAP method.

Solar powered electric vehicles (SPEVs) charge their energy storages from photovoltaic (PV) panels via on-board charger. The battery charger for these vehicles is mainly dependent on the DC-DC stage. Accordingly, this paper proposes an on-board battery charger utilizing a novel dual-output isolated DC-DC converter to charge battery and supercapacitor (SC) simultaneously. This topology uses impedance quasi-Z source network and also integrates both switched-capacitors and coupled-inductor techniques to achieve higher voltage gain ratio. Furthermore, compared to the traditional battery chargers, due to the use of only two switches, the number of components, the system size and the corresponding cost can be reduced. The results obtained by computer simulation demonstrate that the high voltage gain is obtained for both battery and SC ports at lower values of duty ratio with an efficiency of more than 94.5%. Finally, experiments with a 150W prototype are demonstrated in the laboratory to investigate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed SPEVs charger.

Solar energy is used for domestic, industrial, and power plant consumption. From a nation-wide perspective, it has attracted increasing attention due to creating opportunities, reducing fossil fuels consumption, and also meeting the requirements for reduction of environmental pollutants. Given its geographical location which has endowed Iran with a desirable level of solar energy as a renewable source of energy, it is the first paper aimed to conduct a potentiometric study of constructing a 20 kW power plant in 31 capital cities in Iran, considering all the existing losses. PVsyst 6.7 and Meteonorm 7.1 software packages are used for analysis. Results showed that the required area for monocrystalline solar panels was less than that for polycrystalline ones and for polycrystalline less than thin-film panels. Furthermore, solar cells with higher manufacturing technology incurred lower costs, so that monocrystalline cells produced the cheapest solar-powered electricity, while the electricity generated by thin-film panels was the most expensive. In addition, it was found that ventilation had less impact on monocrystalline solar cells than polycrystalline, and less on polycrystalline panels than thin-film ones. The highest (39˚) and lowest (27˚) annual optimum tilt angle were related to Bojnoord and Bandar Abbas, respectively. Also, the results revealed that the highest (0.833) and lowest (0.771) annual performance ratios were obtained for Ardabil and Ahvaz, respectively. The highest (35276) and lowest (24031) amount of annual energy injected to the grid (kWh) were associated with Zahedan and Sari, respectively. Average annual energy injected to the grid (kWh) for the studied stations was 30942. For a more detailed evaluation of the effect that each type of losses had on the energy produced, annual loss diagrams, which are the most important outputs of PVsyst software, were evaluated for Zahedan and Sari stations.

This study has examined the use of a cylindrical parabolic collector (CPC) and solar panels in the solar still unit for more heating. The results of two different setups were then compared so that the first setup was a simple solar still unit and the second setup was a solar still unit with solar panels and the CPC device. The depth of saline water in the basin was 30 mm. Based on the results, the use of solar panels, thermal elements and the CPC device had a major impact on the amount of water sweetening during the experiments. In this paper, the experiments presented a new method for increasing the amount of water. With regards to the newly presented method, there has been a significant increase in the amount of solar energy absorbed in the whole process of water sweetening. Experiments were performed at 300-watt and 400-watt solar panels and CPC devices with lengths of 1 m and 2 m. The cooling of solar panels was also investigated and compared with the process without cooling.