An adsorption system driven by solar heat or waste heat can help to eliminate the use of ozone depletion substances, such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and hydro-chlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs). In recent years, adsorption system has witnessed an increasing interest in many fields due to the fact that this system is quiet, long lasting, cheap to maintain and environmentally benign. Although adsorpt...

This study has investigated the feasibility of three different solar-assisted air conditioning systems for typical medium-sized office buildings in all eight Australian capital cities using the whole building energy simulation software EnergyPlus. The studied solar cooling systems include: solar desiccant-evaporative cooling (SDEC) system, hybrid solar desiccant-compression cooling (SDCC) syste...

Unglazed transpired collectors or UTC (also known as perforated collectors) are a relatively new development in solar collector technology, introduced in the early nineties for ventilation air heating. These collectors are used in several large buildings in Canada, USA and Europe, effecting considerable savings in energy and heating costs. Transpired collectors are a potential replacement for g...

Solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity generation is expanding rapidly in China, with total capacity projected to be 400 GW by 2030. However, severe aerosol pollution over China reduces solar radiation reaching the surface. We estimate the aerosol impact on solar PV electricity generation at the provincial and regional grid levels in China. Our approach is to examine the 12-year (2003-2014) averag...

Self-sustainable energy sources are essential for a wide array of wireless applications deployed in remote field locations. Due to their self-assembling and self-repairing properties, "biological solar (bio-solar) cells" are recently gaining attention for those applications. The bio-solar cell can continuously generate electricity from microbial photosynthetic and respiratory activities under d...

Soot particles produced by incomplete combustion processes are one of the major components of urban air pollution. Chemistry at their surfaces lead to the heterogeneous conversion of several key trace gases; for example NO(2) interacts with soot and is converted into HONO, which rapidly photodissociates to form OH in the troposphere. In the dark, soot surfaces are rapidly deactivated under atmo...