The heating of the solar corona has been a fundamental astrophysical issue for over sixty years. Over the last decade in particular, space-based solar observatories (Yohkoh, SOHOandTRACE) have revealed the complex and often subtlemagnetic-field and plasma interactions throughout the solar atmosphere in unprecedented detail. It is now established that any energy release mechanism is magnetic in ...

Up to now solar heat has been stored mostly in well insulated water tanks. The volume of these tanks is as large as 3 m3 for relatively high solar fractions and up to 70 m3 for full solar coverage for a single-family house. Storage tanks of this size are expensive and space consuming. In new buildings, provisions can be made to accommodate large storage volumes but this type of system is not li...

Parker’s initial insights from 1958 provided a key causal link between the heating of the solar corona and the acceleration of the solar wind. However, we still do not know what fraction of the solar wind’s mass, momentum, and energy flux is driven by Parker-type gas pressure gradients, and what fraction is driven by, e.g., wave-particle interactions or turbulence. SOHO has been pivotal in brin...

Dust devils are common but meteorologically unique phenomena on Earth and on Mars. The phenomenon produces a vertical vortex motion in the atmosphere boundary layer and often occurs in hot desert regions, especially in the afternoons from late spring to early summer. Dust devils usually contain abundant wind energy, for example, a maximum swirling wind velocity of up to 25 m/s, with a 15 m/s ma...

The solar gravity heat pipe has been widely used for solar thermal water heating because of its high efficient heat transfer and thermal diode characteristics. Operated on fluctuant and low intensity solar radiation conditions, a solar gravity heat pipe may frequently start up. This severely affects its solar collection performance. To enhance the thermal performance of the solar gravity heat p...

Introduction: Induction heating is the release of thermal energy within a body due to the resistance of that material to a current passing through it. This mechanism is also called Joule heating or Ohmic dissipation. Induction heating has been proposed as a process that could have caused metamorphism and melting in planetesimals in the early solar system [1]. Although other theories are more wi...

We introduce the improved Freie Universität Berlin (FUB) high-resolution radiation scheme FUBRad and compare it to the 4-band standard ECHAM5 SW radiation scheme of Fouquart and Bonnel (FB). Both schemes are validated against the detailed radiative transfer model libRadtran. FUBRad produces realistic heating rate variations during the solar cycle. The SW heating rate response with the FB scheme...

Solar heating is one of the important utilities of solar energy both in domestic and industrial sectors. Evacuated tube heaters are a commonly used technology for domestic water heating. However, increasing cost of copper and nickel has resulted in huge initial cost for these types of heaters. Utilizing solar energy more economically for domestic use requires new concept which has low initial a...