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ENERGY SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY S E OLAR NERGY S P AND OLAR ANELS S , P YSTEMS ERFORMANCE R D AND ECENT EVELOPMENTS JOEL G. CARTER EDITOR New York Copyright © 2017 by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means: electronic, electrostatic, magnetic, tape, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the Publisher. We have partnered with Copyright Clearance Center to make it easy for you to obtain permissions to reuse content from this publication. Simply navigate to this publication’s page on Nova’s website and locate the “Get Permission” button below the title description. This button is linked directly to the title’s permission page on copyright.com. Alternatively, you can visit copyright.com and search by title, ISBN, or ISSN. 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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 978-1-53610-408-0 (e-book) Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York CONTENTS Preface vii Chapter 1 Solar-Energy-Driven Bioethanol Production from Carbohydrates for Transportation Applications 1 Betina Tabah, Indra Neel Pulidindi, Venkateswara Rao Chitturi, Leela Mohana Reddy Arava and Aharon Gedanken Chapter 2 PV Panel Modeling and Identification 67 Li Hong Idris Lim, Zhen Ye, Dazhi Yang and Han Chong Shaun Tay Chapter 3 Statistical Modeling, Parameter Estimation and Measurement Planning for PV Degradation 123 Dazhi Yang, Licheng Liu, Carlos David Rodríguez-Gallegos, Zhen Ye and Li Hong Idris Lim Chapter 4 Comparison for Policy and Promotion Strategy of Solar Energy Developments between Taiwan and Japan 151 Tzu-Yi Pai, Keisuke Hanaki, Yi-Ti Tung and Pei-Yu Wang Chapter 5 The Future of Organic Solar Energy Harvesting Complexes 165 Julie L. H. Kho, Margaux Airey and M. Cather Simpson Index 197 PREFACE Indiscriminate extraction and increasing consumption of fossil fuel resources (crude oil, natural gas, and coal) are adversely affecting the major spheres of human activity. With the depletion of these fuels, efforts are being directed to the use of renewable sources such as solar, wind, and biomass. This book provides new research on the systems, performance and recent developments in solar energy. As explained in Chapter 1, one of the best alternatives to petroleum, the production of bioethanol has increased since 1990, with a sharp increase from the year 2000 onwards. Bioethanol also offers an attractive alternative as a fuel in low-temperature fuel cells, as it can be produced in large quantities from agricultural waste and biomass. Currently, global ethanol is produced mainly from sugar and starch feedstock. Successful utilization of solar energy which is renewable, abundant, and inexpensive, for bioethanol production from biomass, has the potential to solve the fuel shortage problem. Solar energy provides an important alternative energy source, even if only a portion of this energy is harnessed for heating applications. The authors work focuses on using solar thermal energy for bioreaction leading to ethanol production. A solar reactor was developed to perform the conversion of starch (in a batch process) and glucose (in a continuous flow system) to bioethanol by heating the reactor using solar irradiation. Aqueous starch solution (5 wt%) was charged into the reactor bed loaded with baker’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and enzymes, resulting in the conversion of starch into ethanol in a single-step process, yielding 0.5 M, 25 mL ethanol/day. A significant amount of ethanol corresponding to 84% of the theoretical yield was obtained after two months. The process was scaled up to 15 wt% starch, producing 1.3 M ethanol, which was demonstrated as a potential and sustainable fuel for direct ethanol fuel cells (DEFCs) (310 mAmg -1, 0.75 Pt viii Joel G. Carter V). Additionally, the secondary metabolite glycerol was fully reduced to 1,3- propanediol, which is the first example of a fungal strain that converts glycerol in situ to a value-added product. The batch process of bioethanol production was further developed to a continuous-flow process. When aqueous glucose solutions of 10, 20, 30, and 40 wt% were fed into the reactor, high ethanol yields (91, 86, 89, and 88% of the theoretical yield, respectively) were obtained, indicating the atom efficiency of the process. No loss was observed in the activity of the yeast even after two months of continuous operation of the process. The ethanol produced from 20 wt% glucose feed (2 M) was demonstrated as a potential fuel for DEFCs with current and power density values as high as 700 mA/cm2 and 330 mW/cm2 at a modest open circuit voltage of 1.65 V. Productive utilization of solar energy for driving the fermentation reaction as well as the special design of the reactor that facilitates in situ separation of ethanol from the fermentation broth, make the current process economically feasible and environmentally friendly, and therefore industrially appealing and adoptable. In Chapter 2, the modelling techniques of PV panels from I-V characteristics are discussed. At the beginning, a necessary review on the various methods are presented, where difficulties in mathematics, drawbacks in accuracy, and challenges in implementation are highlighted. Next, a novel approach based on linear system identification is demonstrated in detail. Other than the prevailing methods of using approximation (analytical methods), iterative searching (classical optimization), or soft computing (artificial intelligence), the proposed method regards the PV diode model as the equivalent output of a dynamic system, so the diode model parameters can be linked to the transfer function coefficients of the same dynamic system. In this way, the problem of solving PV model parameters is equivalently converted to system identification in control theory, which can be perfectly solved by a simple integral-based linear least square method. Graphical meanings of the proposed method are illustrated to help readers understand the underlying principles. As compared to other methods, the proposed one has the following benefits: 1) unique solution; 2) no iterative or global searching; 3) easy to implement (linear least square); 4) accuracy; 5) extendable to multi-diode models. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified by indoor and outdoor PV module testing results. In addition, possible applications of the proposed method are discussed like online PV monitoring and diagnostics, non-contact measurement of POA irradiance and cell temperature, fast model identification for satellite PV panels, and etc.