Welcome to DSECS! Feel free to explore the materials complimentary to the course, Design of Solar Energy Conversion Systems.
Scope of Education:
Solar Energy
A ubiquitous resource available for energy conversion that supports life, industry, and society.
Course Overview:
This course establishes foundations for most solar energy conversion technologies, emphasizing the goal of solar energy engineering: to 1.) maximize the solar utility 2.) for a group of clients or stakeholders 3.) in a given locale. The course also works to explain concepts and implementation of solar conversion processes.
Context for Solar:
Solar energy conversion is a field containing systems thinking, applied science, and engineering; there are a lot of linked components in the system to keep track of in the design, implementation, and maintenance processes. To design technologies relevant to each region requires knowledge of the social context, the energy demands and economic constraints of a client or stakeholders, as well as knowledge of the specific locale or region, considering the quantity and character of the solar resource.
Contact Information if you need to contact me for questions.
General Programming in Solar Energy
The course in Solar Energy Conversion requires understanding of many parameters, and study of how each parameter changes in relation to the others over the course of minutes, hours, days, seasons, and years. The modern way to work with all of those parameters is to use computing tools: text editors, command interfaces, ASCII files, math software, and simulation software. In the future, those of your who continue to work in the solar field will learn to internalize most of these changing conditions, and yet you will still come to rely on simulations to describe the systems behavior of the whole.
LaTeX:
Our templates for homework will be formatted in LaTeX markup. This is due to the extensive amount of mathematical formulae used in solar energy education, and to keep a consistent look to our homework reports. Keep in mind that markup such as LATEX is used by NASA engineers, scientists and economists around the world, and lots of students--for a brief background, please see the FAQ: What is TeX?
Text Editors
The best text editors for our work are small, simple, and free. On the Mac, I recommend Text Wrangler, while on a Windows system, I highly recommend Notepad++.
Of course, my favorite paid-for text editor is Text Mate.
ScribTeX
For those of you wishing to explore LaTeX without installing it on a computer, please visit ScribTeX. The accounts are free for small projects like this course, and you can access your account from a simple browser. The downside is that ScibTeX does not include line numbers in the text editor, but otherwise it is quite useful and easy.
Software and Modeling in Solar Energy
A reliance on simulations means that a skilled professional will also understand some elements of computer programming. Even when using a fully developed program with a graphical user interface to obscure the working functions, it is to your benefit to understand the underlying algorithms.
Scilab:
Scilab is an open source Matlab clone developed and used extensively for science and engineering problems. We will be using Scilab extensively to solve problems and graph our results.
Scilab is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux OSes. However, if you are using the 64-bit Lion version on the Mac, you are recommended to download a binary from the nightly build (there is a bug in the main download for Lion).
Sage:
Sage is an amazing compilation of the Python programming language, which makes extensive use of NumPy and SciPy. Sage is further adapted to be a web notebook for problem solving in science and engineering. Sage is an accessible, viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and Matlab.
To use sage directly in the web notebook, please visit the sage notebook page.
SAM: Systems Advisor Model
SAM is a tool developed by the USA Dept. of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL, pronounced "en-rel").
SAM uses the powerful simulation engine of TRNSYS (pronounced "tran-sis"), developed by the Solar Energy Laboratory at the University of Wisonsin--Madison and by TESS (Thermal Energy Systems Specialists).