We conducted an analytic study of concentrated solar photovoltaic and hot water co-generation based on various solar cell technologies and micro channel heat sinks. By co-optimizing the electricity generation and heat transport in the system, one can minimize the cost of the key materials and compare different tradeoffs as a function of concentration ratio or other parameters. Concentrated sola...

PbTe is an extremely important thermoelectric (TE) material, due to its high TE conversion efficiency. Consequently, our effort focuses on developing PbTebased TE modules, which requires developing novel approaches for bonding metallic contacts to PbTe. In this study, Fe, Mo, and NiFeMo alloy foils were directly bonded to n-type PbTe using a rapid hot press at 600, 700, or 800 C under a pressur...

Producing more food per unit of water has never been as important as it is at present, and the demand for water by economic sectors other than agriculture will necessarily put a great deal of pressure on a dwindling resource, leading to a call for increases in the productivity of water in agriculture. This topic has been given high priority in the research agenda for the last 30 years, but with...

Energy recovery from waste heat is attracting more and more attention. All electronic systems consume electricity but only a fraction of it is used for information processing and for human interfaces, such as displays. Lots of energy is dissipated as heat. There are some discussions on waste heat recovery from the electronic systems such as laptop computers. However the efficiency of energy con...

In this work the effects of heat generation on the modes of Yb:Glass double clad fiber laser were investigated. The thermal dispersion and thermally-induced birefringence were considered when the gain medium becomes an anisotropic medium. The results showed considerable modifications of laser modes profiles, in particular for transfer magnetic (TM) and transfer electric (TE) modes which their p...

Multi-angular observation of land surface thermal radiation is considered to be a promising method of performing the angular normalization of land surface temperature (LST) retrieved from remote sensing data. This paper focuses on an investigation of the minimum requirements of viewing angles to perform such normalizations on LST. The normally kernel-driven bi-directional reflectance distributi...

Crystalline C60 is an appealing candidate material for thermoelectric (TE) applications due to its extremely low thermal conductivity and potentially high electrical conductivity with metal atom intercalation. We investigate the TE properties of crystalline C60 intercalated with alkali and alkaline earth metals using both classical and quantum mechanical calculations. For the electronic structu...

This study describes a capillary-based device integrated with the heating and cooling modules for polymerase chain reaction (PCR). The device consists of the reaction polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) capillary, the aluminum blocks, and is equipped with two cartridge heaters, a thermoelectric (TE) cooler, a fan, and some thermocouples for temperature control. The cartridge heaters are placed into ...