Photon transport in plane-parallel, vertically inhomogeneous clouds is investigated and applied to cloud remote sensing techniques that use solar reflectance or transmittance measurements for retrieving droplet effective radius. Transport is couched in terms of weighting functions which approximate the relative contribution of individual layers to the overall retrieval. Two vertical weightings ...

Low temperature fabrication of CdTe (1.25 μm)/CdS (120 nm) thinfilm solar cells was explored using in situ pulsed laser deposition (PLD) in order to control the CdTe grain morphology, crystallinity, and CdS/CdTe interface, which have proven to be crucial in CdTe/CdS solar cell performance. A comparative study was carried out on solar cells fabricated using PLD with the CdTe layer either grown d...

Modern buildings normally have large windows and glass facades, known jointly as glazings, for achieving good day-lighting and indoors–outdoors contact. However, glazings are challenging for the buildings’ energy efficiency and frequently let in or out too much energy, which has to be balanced by active cooling or heating. Cooling requirements, in particular, have soared recently. Emerging tech...

it is accepted that the visual comfort in schools depends on the quality of the whole visual environment. this leads to the concern upon the quality and quantity of lighting. currently in iran, in order to calculate energy transfer for public buildings a coefficient is usually used. this coefficient considers the rate of sunlight energy absorption in these kinds of buildings. to increase the de...

We report a new semitransparent inverted polymer solar cell (PSC) with a structure of glass/FTO/nc-TiO2/P3HT:PCBM/MoO3/Ag/MoO3. Because high-temperature annealing which decreased the conductivity of indium tin oxide (ITO) must be handled in the process of preparation of nanocrystalline titanium oxide (nc-TiO2), we replace glass/ITO with a glass/fluorine-doped tin oxide (FTO) substrate to improv...

A method is presented for estimating subaqueous integrated backscatter using near-nadir viewing satellite lidar. The algorithm takes into account specular reflection of laser light, laser scattering by wind-generated foam as well as sun glint and solar scattering from foam. The formulation is insensitive to the estimate of wind speed but sensitive to the estimate of transmittance used in the at...

Kapton polyimide is known for its high thermal stability, >400 ◦C. Copper sulfide thin films of 75 and 100 nm thickness were coated on DuPont Kapton HN polyimide foils of 25 μm thickness by floating them on a chemical bath containing copper complexes and thiourea. The coated foils were annealed at 150–400 ◦C in nitrogen, converting the coating from CuS to Cu1.8S. The sheet resistance of the ann...

Natural biomass based cellulose nanopaper is becoming a promising transparent substrate to supersede traditional petroleum based polymer films in realizing future flexible paper-electronics. Here, ultrathin, highly transparent, outstanding conductive hybrid nanopaper with excellent mechanical flexibility was synthesized by the assembly of nanofibrillated cellulose (NFC) and silver nanowires (Ag...

Mud formed from environmental dust particles in humid ambient air significantly influences the performance of solar harvesting devices. This study examines the characterization of environmental dust particles and the chemo-mechanics of dry mud formed from dust particles. Analytical tools, including scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy, energy dispersive spectroscopy, particle s...

A method for the radiometric correction of wide field-of-view airborne imagery has been developed that accounts for the angular dependence of the path radiance and atmospheric transmittance functions to remove atmospheric and topographic effects. The first part of processing is the parametric geocoding of the scene to obtain a geocoded, orthorectified image and the view geometry (scan and azimu...