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Mechanical Engineering Commons

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Honors Theses

Theses/Dissertations

Mechanical Engineering

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Full-Text Articles in Mechanical Engineering

Enhancing Bifacial Pv Efficiency With The Addition Of A Rear Side Reflector, Neila Watson Jun 2022

Enhancing Bifacial Pv Efficiency With The Addition Of A Rear Side Reflector, Neila Watson

Honors Theses

Bifacial photovoltaics are an expanding sector of solar electricity production, collecting solar energy on the front, back, and sides of the module. This increases the efficiency by around 10% to 30% over a typical mono facial cell, which only collects sunlight on the front. However, the performance of bifacial PV arrays depends on a variety of factors, including temperature, shadows, solar insolation, and set-up geometry. The geometry is affected by the tilt angle, the azimuth angle, the height from the ground to the panel, and the reflectance from the ground surface. The addition of a reflector, usually white in color …


Utilizing The Product Development Process To Bring An Idea From Concept To Production, Sydney Ferguson, Jackson Sneed May 2020

Utilizing The Product Development Process To Bring An Idea From Concept To Production, Sydney Ferguson, Jackson Sneed

Honors Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to document and discuss the five-stage product development process starting with defining a problem and resulting in manufacturing a final product for sale as it was implemented in the Portable Fire Pit Center for Manufacturing Excellence Senior Capstone Project. This project was carried out over the course of the Fall 2019 and Spring 2020 semesters by a team consisting of three Undergraduate Mechanical Engineering majors and two Undergraduate Accountancy majors. The ultimate goal of the project was to carry out a full production run of the Portable Fire Pit outputting fifteen units meeting retail …