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
Engineering
Fresh water is scarce in many parts of the world and must be obtained at great expense. Communities near the ocean can desalinate sea water for this purpose, but doing so requires a large amount of energy. Further away from ...
Jun 23, 2021
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1426
Energy & Green Tech
Australian photovoltaics researchers have made a 'cool' discovery: Singlet fission and tandem solar cells—two innovative ways to generate solar power more efficiently—also help to lower operating temperatures and keep ...
May 10, 2021
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365
Engineering
As environmental and energy crises become increasingly more common occurrences around the world, a thermal energy harvester capable of converting abundant thermal energy—such as solar radiation, waste heat, combustion of ...
Mar 31, 2021
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563
Energy & Green Tech
While solar power is a leading form of renewable energy, new research suggests that changes to regional climates brought on by global warming could make areas currently considered ideal for solar power production less viable ...
Oct 7, 2020
0
72
Energy & Green Tech
An international team of researchers has found that air pollution in China is dramatically reducing the amount of power that is generated by solar cells in that country. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy, ...
Energy & Green Tech
As the globe grapples with the urgent need to shift from fossil fuels to sustainable energy sources, solar power stands as a beacon of hope. However, a significant challenge has been to efficiently capture and utilize the ...
Apr 18, 2024
0
1
Energy & Green Tech
In a new study published in the Journal of Remote Sensing in February 2024, researchers utilized data augmentation alongside the LightGBM machine learning model for the estimation of both diffuse and direct solar radiation. ...
Mar 15, 2024
0
23
Energy & Green Tech
State-of-the-art printed flexible solar cell technology developed by Australia's national science agency, CSIRO, was successfully launched into space today (March 5) aboard Australia's largest private satellite, Optimus-1, ...
Mar 5, 2024
0
13
Engineering
An innovative probe which can operate in temperatures as high as molten lava has been created by researchers.
Feb 29, 2024
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67
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
