Engineering
Glass facades characterize modern architecture. While solar radiation serves to support heating in winter, the building interior heats up in summer and requires active cooling. Smart windows can regulate the solar radiation ...
Sep 22, 2022
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4
Energy & Green Tech
The economy of Southern Africa is rapidly developing, driving a growing demand for electricity. Efficiently meeting this demand will require balancing social, economic, geographic, technological and environmental considerations.
Aug 8, 2022
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25
Engineering
Passive day cooling is a promising technology for the sustainable reduction of energy consumption. It avoids the heating up of buildings by solar radiation and dissipates accumulated heat without external energy consumption. ...
Jul 18, 2022
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369
Electronics & Semiconductors
Perovskites, which have shown enormous potential as a new semiconductor for solar cells, are gaining attention as well as a potential next-generation technology to also power spacefaring missions. As scientists around the ...
Apr 19, 2022
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134
Energy & Green Tech
Installing solar panels along a part of Saudi Arabia's west coast could generate enough rainwater to meet the annual consumption needs of five million people. An international team developed a weather forecasting model and ...
Apr 13, 2022
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50
Engineering
About 750 million people in the world do not have access to electricity at night. Solar cells provide power during the day, but saving energy for later use requires substantial battery storage.
Apr 5, 2022
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675
Energy & Green Tech
A new device harvests two types of energy during the daytime, making it cool on one end and hot on the other, to generate electricity around the clock. With further improvements, the device could be used in off-grid Internet-of-things ...
Mar 8, 2022
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43
Energy & Green Tech
The world is in dire need of a large-scale transition away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy sources to prevent an environmental crisis. Thanks to recent advances in various scientific and engineering disciplines, ...
Oct 28, 2021
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5
Energy & Green Tech
A research team at the University of Córdoba has developed and evaluated models for the prediction of solar radiation in nine locations in southern Spain and North Carolina (USA).
Jul 8, 2021
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13
Energy & Green Tech
A team from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin, Ulm University, and Heidelberg University has now investigated how hydrogen can be produced at the South Pole using sunlight, and which method is the most promising. Their conclusion: ...
Jul 2, 2021
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Sunlight, in the broad sense, is the total spectrum of the electromagnetic radiation given off by the Sun. On Earth, sunlight is filtered through the atmosphere, and the solar radiation is obvious as daylight when the Sun is above the horizon. Near the poles in summer, the days are longer and the nights are shorter or non-existent. In the winter at the poles the nights are longer and for some periods of time, sunlight may not occur at all. When the direct radiation is not blocked by clouds, it is experienced as sunshine, a combination of bright light and heat. Radiant heat directly produced by the radiation of the sun is different from the increase in atmospheric temperature due to the radiative heating of the atmosphere by the sun's radiation. Sunlight may be recorded using a sunshine recorder, pyranometer or pyrheliometer. Sunlight takes about 8.3 minutes to reach the Earth. The World Meteorological Organization defines sunshine as direct irradiance from the Sun measured on the ground of at least 120 watts per square metre.
Direct sunlight has a luminous efficacy of about 93 lumens per watt of radiant flux, which includes infrared, visible, and ultra-violet light. Bright sunlight provides luminance of approximately 100,000 candela per square meter at the Earth's surface.
Sunlight is a key factor in photosynthesis, a process crucially important for life on Earth.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
