Engineering Commons^™

Portable Solar Desalination System, Genaro Sanchez, Alan Galarza, Erick Del Real

Electrical Engineering

Clean water and reliable energy can be difficult to obtain in remote locations such as desert villages, secluded islands, and other places where no fresh water can be found. The primary goal for this project is address these problems by implementing a portable desalinization plant system that is to be powered by solar energy PV system as the main energy source.

Photovoltaic Emulator Adaptable To Irradiance, Temperature And Panel Specific I-V Curves, Joseph Gamos Durago

Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the design and performance of a photovoltaic (PV) emulator. With increasing interest in renewable energies, large amounts of money and effort are being put into research and development for photovoltaic systems. The larger interest in PV systems has increased demand for appropriate equipment with which to test PV systems.

A photovoltaic emulator is a power supply with similar current and voltage characteristics as a PV panel. This work uses an existing power supply which is manipulated via Labview to emulate a photovoltaic panel. The emulator calculates a current-voltage (I-V) curve based on the user specified parameters of …

Solar Instrumentation Lab, Rene Canedo Iii, Rong Gui Chen

Electrical Engineering

This project is a mobile platform that will allow experiments on different solar panels to be done easily while keeping the cost of the lab to a minimum. California Polytechnic State University’s motto is ‘learn by doing’ and this lab structure will allow students to get practical experience with photovoltaic cells and the instruments that are required to take measurements. The solar instrumentation lab is a potential hardware lab for the electrical engineering department’s Sustainable Electric Energy Conversion class EE 420 and Solar-Photovoltaic Systems Design EE 520. This group took the current solar structure as a base for the lab’s …

Solar Powered Electric Clothes Dryer, Roger Mai, Alan Swe

Electrical Engineering

Appliances that consume the most energy in a household usually involve heating, and an electric clothes dryer is one such appliance, consuming up to 4KW of power. The most environmentally friendly way is to hang clothes outside to dry, a natural solar and wind powered method, but unfortunately most people are unable to do so as some neighborhood communities do not allow the hanging of laundry outside as it is regarded as “unsightly”, for example. This project aims to provide an alternate solution to the wall-powered electric clothes dryer by designing one which operates entirely off the grid.

Off-Grid Photovoltaic System Design Project, Brian Duffy

Electrical Engineering

This project uses the BP SX 150S solar panel to charge a 12 V battery. This battery powers an AIMS 400 W Modified Sine Wave Inverter to provide 120 V RMS AC power to a load of up to 40 W. Inverter efficiency was measured at different load conditions. A control circuit was implemented to prevent overcharging or over-discharging of the battery, by disconnecting it from the panel or the load, respectively. The control circuit turn-on and cutoff voltages were measured versus battery voltage, and the on-resistance of the MOSFET switches was measured for various load currents. A table of …