Solar energy is rapidly advancing as an important means of renewable energy resource. More energy is produced by tracking the solar panel to remain aligned to the sun at a right angle to the rays of light. This paper describes in detail the design and construction of a prototype for solar tracking system with two degrees of freedom, which detects the sunlight using photocells. The control circu...

Solar panels have been improving in efficiency and dropping in price, and are therefore becoming more common and economically viable. However, the performance of solar panels depends not only on the weather, but also on other external factors such as shadow, dirt, dust, etc. In this paper, we describe a simple and practical data-driven method for classifying anomalies in the power output of sol...

PHOENICS-2010 has been applied to the simulation of heat transfer within a solar panel design on behalf of the LE2M Laboratory of ICAM, Nantes, France. The panel is assumed to be horizontal and consists of three layers; glass, collector and backboard, with air spaces between. The aim of the panel is to warm air through solar irradiation. The glass and collector gather heat by the "greenhouse ef...

One potentially cost-effective approach to harvesting solar power from space is the use of thousands of individual robots moving in formation, each with a piece of solar panel attached, to form a solar panel array. In previous work, we demonstrated an algorithm that treats a group of robots as a 1-dimensional cellular automaton, which is able to establish formations defined by a single mathemat...

The SCANS is a structural health monitoring (SHM) system is being developed by Acellent Technologies to monitor steel bridges. The required voltage of the system is 14.4 V for active scanning, and the power consumption is approximately 8 W. The investigated energy harvesting from both solar and thermal sources to recharge the lithium-ion battery of the system. A solar panel and a Thermal Electr...

pastures play an important role in protecting environment and ecosystems. unfortunately more than 40 percent of pasturess in the world have been destroyed and 20 percent of destroyed pastures are located in developing countries. application of solar energy could significantly contribute to preserving the pastures. the main purpose of this study was to examine the role of solar energy in protect...

The objective of this study is to improve the design of hydronic radiant panel systems through the understanding of the thermal performance of panel systems. The scope of this study includes performing experiments using testing facilities and the radiant panel ceiling in the Energy Research House, and developing a theoretical model that can predict heat transfer from a radiant ceiling panel. In...