An efficient antireflection coating is critical for the improvement of silicon solar cell performance via increased light coupling. Here, we have grown well-aligned ZnO nanowhisker (NW) arrays on Czochralski silicon solar cells by a seeding-growth two-step process. It is found that the ZnO NWs have a great effect on the macroscopic antireflection effect and, therefore, improves the solar cell p...

Silicon nanowire possesses great potential as the material for renewable energy harvesting and conversion. The significantly reduced spectral reflectivity of silicon nanowire to visible light makes it even more attractive in solar energy applications. However, the benefit of its use for solar thermal energy harvesting remains to be investigated and has so far not been clearly reported. The purp...

A method is proposed that uses renewable solar energy to supply energy for the exploitation of marine gas hydrates using thermal stimulation. The system includes solar cells, which are installed on the platform and a distributor with electric heaters. The solar module is connected with electric heaters via an insulated cable, and provides power to the heaters. Simplified equations are given for...

Received Sep 9, 2017 Revised Oct 28, 2017 Accepted Nov 15, 2017 Wind energy and solar energy are the prime energy sources which are being utilized for renewal energy. The performance of a photovoltaic (PV) array for solar energy is affected by temperature, irradiation, shading, and array configuration. Often, the PV arrays are shadowed, completely or partially, by the passing clouds, neighborin...

As satellite payload electrical power system requirements continue to grow, satellite systems employing flat panel arrays have reached limits set by either on-orbit dynamics that limit the size and shape of the deployed array, mass constraints set by the launch vehicle, or by the limits set by the volume constraints of the launch shroud. This has caused several satellite programs to approach po...

Introduction: The Genesis mission collected solar wind for 27 months at Earth-Sun L1 on both passive and active collectors carried inside of a Science Canister, which was cleaned and assembled in an ISO Class 4 cleanroom prior to launch. The primary passive collectors, 271 individual hexagons and 30 half-hexagons of semiconductor materials, are described in [1]. Since the hard landing reduced t...

− In this paper, a self-organizing learning array (SOLAR) and its hardware-software (HW/SW) co-simulation are presented. In SOLAR, every neuron maximizes its information index during feed forward self-organizing learning. SOLAR was simulated on benchmark examples and showed good ability to learn exceeding the performance of many traditional classifier algorithms. A simple HW/SW co-simulation me...

Neural network-based adaptive control is considered for active control of a highly flexible truss structure which may be used to support solar sail membranes. The objective is to suppress unwanted vibrations in SAFE (Solar Array Flight Experiment) boom_ a test-bed located at NASA. Compared to previous tests that restrained truss structures in planar motion, full three dimensional motions are te...