Traditional fossil fuels lead to environmental problems and are also depleting. A significant portion of global energy consumption is due to building’s air conditioning. Nowadays there is a great attention toward renewable and sustainable energy sources to support the buildings energy requirements. In this study, a solar cooling machine was designed for a three-floor residential building under ...

Air conditioning is an important part in building services world-wide in both commercial and residential buildings. With the general attempt to reduce the usage of fossil fuels and increase the usage of green solutions, the market for solar air conditioning is growing rapidly. Solar air conditioning combines solar thermal absorbers to transfer solar radiation into heat with heat-driven cooling ...

Extracting the light trapped in a waveguide, or the opposite effect of trapping light in a thin region and guiding it perpendicular to its incident propagation direction, is essential for optimal energetic performance in illumination, display or light harvesting devices. Here we demonstrate that the paradoxical goal of letting as much light in or out while maintaining the wave effectively trapp...

Earth is the only terrestrial planet in our solar system where an oceanic plate subducts beneath an overriding plate. Although the initiation of plate subduction requires extremely weak boundaries between strong plates, the way in which oceanic mantle rheologically weakens remains unknown. Here we show that shear-enhanced hydration reactions contribute to the generation and maintenance of weak ...

A new device of inserting an absorbing plate to divide a flat-plate channel into two channels with fins attached and external recycling at the ends, resulting in substantially improving the heat transfer efficiency, has been investigated both experimentally and theoretically. The agreement of the theoretical predictions with those measured values from the experimental results is fairly good. Th...

The Solar Aspect System (SAS) of the rotating (15 rpm) RHESSI spacecraft has three subsystems. Each of these measures the position of the limb by sampling the solar chord profile with a linear CCD and a narrow-bandwidth filter at 670 nm. With a plate scale of 1.7 arcsec/pixel, the precision of each of the six simultaneously observed limb positions is observed to be better than 50 mas, using fou...

The objective of this research is to achieve a high solar fraction in social housing, for which investment costs are strictly limited. Six houses have been built in the east of France: two with active (solar collectors) and four with passive (Trombe walls) solar heating systems. Two types of transparent covers are compared: a capillary structure and a simpler polycarbonate plate. The project wa...

Novel birefringent liquid crystal polymer homeotropic films have been coated on semiconductor solar cells to improve the effective incident sunlight angles. The liquid crystal polymer precursor, based on reactive mesogens, is fluidic and flows like liquid. It would distribute uniformly on the solar cell sample surface by any traditional coating technique. The birefringence for light, due to the...

The influence of recycling on double-pass solar air collectors with welding of the V-corrugated absorber has been studied experimentally and theoretically. Welding the V-corrugated absorber and the recycle-effect concept to the solar air collector was proposed to strengthen the convective heat-transfer coefficient due to turbulence promotion. Both the recycle effect and the V-corrugated absorbe...