many research studies have been performed on forced convection (active) solar dryers for fruit and vegetables. a short survey of these showed that applying the forced convection solar dryer not only significantly reduced the drying time but also resulted in many improvements in the quality of the dried products. active indirect and mixed-mode thin layer solar drying experiments were conducted o...

An integrated solar combined cycle (ISCC) is analyzed at "off-design" operating conditions. Using the principles of thermodynamics heat and mass transfer a computer code is developed in FORTRAN programming language to simulate the system’s hourly performance under steady state conditions. Three scenarios are considered for the study. In the first one, only the combined cycle (CC) is studied. In...

In this study, thermodynamic and economic analysis of a photovoltaic electricity generation system (PVEGS) with and without self-cleaning panels is reported. In the first part, thermodynamic analyses are used to characterize the performance of the system. In the second part, the economic comparison of photovoltaic electricity generation with and without self-cleaning panels is carried out for a...

The optimum design of solar energy systems strongly depends on the accuracy of  solar radiation data. However, the availability of accurate solar radiation data is undermined by the high cost of measuring equipment or non-functional ones. This study developed a feed-forward backpropagation artificial neural network model for prediction of global solar radiation in Makurdi, Nigeria (7.7322  N lo...

Estimation of solar radiation is the most important parameter for various solar energy systems. Expensive devices are required to achieve the amount of solar radiation for a special region, therefore different models have been proposed by researchers to estimate the solar radiation that obviate using such devices. Nonlinear nature and excessive dependence on the meteorological parameters of the...

The solar photovoltaic (PV) energy is one of the most promising sources of energy, which has attracted many interests. Itis potentially the largest source of energy in the world and is capable to mitigategreenhouse gas (GHG) emissions significantly in comparison with fossil fuels.Location optimization of solar plants can play a vital role to rise the efficiency and performance of the solar PV s...