Simulations to evaluate energy demand for heating and cooling and thermal comfort are becoming more and more common place in the building design process, at least in the most complex cases. In all detailed or simplified calculations, to analyse heat transfer to and from a building, several input...

The progress met in the world market of photovoltaics underlines the maturity of investments realized, guarantees the reliability of the technology utilized and designates the variety of applications in covering the energy demands of both stand-alone and grid connected consumers. Concerning...

An experimental technique is presented to non-intrusively measure the quasi-instantaneous aerodynamic loads and surrounding pressure field for a turbine by using particle image velocimetry (PIV). The PIV measurements provide the velocity flow field needed to calculate the pressure field around...

The present work investigates the effectiveness of an innovative procedure to calculate the global real sky irradiance of a mountain urban region, the city of Trento (Italy). The proposed methodology improves the predictive Bird’s real-sky model by introducing in it both atmospheric...

The ground-coupled heat pump (GCHP) system is a type of renewable energy technology providing space heating and cooling as well as domestic hot water. However, experimental studies on GCHP systems are still insufficient. This paper first presents an energy-operational optimisation device for a...

The Parabolic Trough Collector (PTC) is the most common type of high-temperature solar thermal technology, in which the heat transfer fluid is usually synthetic oil, molten salt or water/steam. Experiences in existing plants have shown some operating problems with all these types of fluid, which...

A description of the first solar village project in Syria is given. The Abou-Sorra electrification project supplies power to six households. The nominal power of the solar array is 3.6 kWp. The installation was set up in March 1994 by the Higher Institute of Applied Science & Technology (HIAST)....

Two modifications for solar desalination systems are presented. The first modification, using a packed layer that installed in the bottom of the basin to increase the efficiency of the still. A packed layer is formed from glass balls which is considered as simple thermal storage system. The...