Solar Photovoltaic Water Pumping to Alleviate Drought in Remote Locations

Author(s):  
Kala Meah ◽  
Steven Fletcher ◽  
Yu Wan ◽  
Sadrul Ula

Many parts of the western US is rural in nature and consequently do not have electrical distribution lines in many parts of farms and ranches. Distribution line extension costs can run from $15,000 to $25,000 per mile, thereby making availability of electricity to small water pumping projects economically unattractive. Solar photo-voltaic (PV) powered water pumping is more cost effective in these small scale applications. Many western states including Wyoming are passing through fifth year of drought with the consequent shortages of water for many applications. Wyoming State Climatologist is predicting a possible 5–10 years of drought. Drought impacts the surface water right away, while it takes much longer to impact the underground aquifers. To mitigate the effect on the livestock and wildlife, Wyoming Governor Dave Freudenthal initiated a solar water pumping initiative in cooperation with the University of Wyoming, County Conservation Districts, Rural Electric Cooperatives, and ranching organizations. Solar water pumping has several advantages over traditional systems; for example, diesel or propane engines require not only expensive fuels, they also create noise and air pollution in many remote pristine areas. Solar systems are environment friendly, low maintenance and have no fuel cost. In this paper the design, installation and performance monitoring of the solar system for small scale remote water pumping will be presented.

Processes ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (11) ◽  
pp. 216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Moksadur Rahman ◽  
Valentina Zaccaria ◽  
Xin Zhao ◽  
Konstantinos Kyprianidis

The market for the small-scale micro gas turbine is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Especially, utilization of commercial off-the-shelf components is rapidly reducing the cost of ownership and maintenance, which is paving the way for vast adoption of such units. However, to meet the high-reliability requirements of power generators, there is an acute need of a real-time monitoring system that will be able to detect faults and performance degradation, and thus allow preventive maintenance of these units to decrease downtime. In this paper, a micro gas turbine based combined heat and power system is modelled and used for development of physics-based diagnostic approaches. Different diagnostic schemes for performance monitoring of micro gas turbines are investigated.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-72
Author(s):  
G. Agyei ◽  
J. J. Gordon

Sluicing is the preferred mineral processing technique for the treatment of placer gold-bearing alluvium for small scale and artisanal miners in Ghana because sluice board is perceived to be the most cost effective device. However, there are differences in approaches from design to operation.  In this work, about 50 kg of ore was obtained from “Peace School” small scale mining site near the University of Mines and Technology, Tarkwa. It was processed to determine the effects of riffle height and spacing on gold recovery. It was confirmed that, in order to trap a greater percentage of gold particles, the height of the riffle ought to be higher than the suspension height of the gold. The suspension heights of the gold particles of the various operational regimes of the sluice board at superficial velocities of 0.5 m/s, 1.0 m/s, 1.5 m/s and 2.0 m/ were   0.9 cm, 1.2 cm, 1.5 cm and 2.9 cm respectively. Analysis of concentrates showed that, 85.4% of gold was recovered during sluicing at approximately 1.0 cm riffle height.  The lowest recovery was recorded at 0.5 cm riffle height. Gold recovery was also affected by riffles spacing.  For the indicated speeds and the riffle heights the necessary spacing should not be more than 20 cm. The peak recovery was obtained at a riffle height of 1.0 cm but dropped after 20.0 cm spacing. Keywords: Sluice Board, Riffle Height, Gold, Rifle Spacing 


Author(s):  
Suresh B. Sadineni ◽  
Srikanth Madala ◽  
Robert F. Boehm

A prototype of an integrated tracking and monitoring system is developed and experimentally tested in the environmental conditions of the desert south-west. This system hardware design incorporates both the tracker control and performance monitoring mechanism. A wireless communication protocol coupled with internet transmits the PV panel performance information collected by the electronic sensors to a remote user who can monitor the system performance. The initial experimental results of this newly developed system performance are presented. Finally, an economic analysis is conducted to evaluate the applicability of the current system to a utility scale installation. The preliminary results suggest that there would be a 25% average increase in solar insolation received by a single-axis tracking surface over a fixed (tilt equal to local latitude) surface during the winter months. Although, limited amount of data is available for typical summer days, results from September days suggest an increase in solar insolation as high as 38%. Also, such an integrated tracking and monitoring system will yield in better monitoring resolution due to monitoring at the string level as opposed to central inverter level in the central inverter type PV power plant topology. The monitoring sub-system design incorporates cutting edge electronic sensors. The measurements using these sensors were compared against the measurement through a programmable D.C load. The difference between both the power measurements is well within a median of 5–12% suggesting a good agreement between both the measurements.


2014 ◽  
Vol 695 ◽  
pp. 811-814
Author(s):  
Masin Muhammadu Muhammadu

Nigeria is endowed with abundant energy resources, both conventional and renewable, which can potentially provide the country with a sufficient capacity to meet the ambitions of both urban and rural Nigerians of a full, nationwide electrification level. Yet, Nigeria has one of the lowest consumption rates of electricity per capita in Africa. With the demand superseding the generation, there is inequitable access of rural communities to the electricity service in the country. There are inherent obstacles militating against the effective implementation of an orderly energy policy in Nigeria. The inefficiencies over shadowing the allocation of energy resources coupled with the near depletion of fossil fuels, make it imperative for the country to exploit its huge natural renewable resources to avoid a worsening energy supply scenario and provide feasible solar water pump to rural dwellers. This paper presents the applications of solar water pumping which are already quite significant and are growing at steady rate. Solar energy is suitable for small-scale water pumping in remote areas where the demand is regular, such as for drinking water, but it may also be used for irrigation. Most areas in Nigeria have climates suitable for solar pumping. A review is given of the use of solar energy for water pumping to improve the living conditions of the population in rural areas and to develop techniques for utilization of solar energy in a tropical environment condition. Results, suggests that, solar powered water pumping must be encouraged, promoted, invested, implemented, and demonstrated by full scale in Nigeria.


2013 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Duggan

In this article Patrick Duggan interrogates The Paper Birds' 2010 production Others to explore the political and ethical implications of embodying the (verbatim) texts of others. Built from a six-month exchange of letters between the company and a prisoner, a celebrity (a very non-committal Heather Mills, apparently), and an Iranian artist, Others fuses live music with verbatim and physical theatre texts to investigate the ‘otherness’ of women from vastly divergent cultural contexts. With equal measures of humour and honesty the performance deconstructs these voices both to highlight their particular concerns and problems and to interrogate larger issues relating to ‘others’ with whom we have conscious or unconscious contact. The ethical implications of continuing or discontinuing the correspondences with the three women are explored, and trauma and embodiment theories are used alongside Lévinasian and Russellian theories of ethics to ask what an encounter with such others might teach us about ourselves, about the traumatized other and about the ethics of encounter within performance texts. Patrick Duggan is Lecturer in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Exeter. A practising director, he has also taught extensively in the UK and Ireland as well as in Germany and the United States. He is author of Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance (Manchester University Press, 2012) and co-edited Reverberations: Britishness, Aesthetics and Small-Scale Theatres (Intellect, 2013) and a special issue of the journal Performance Research ‘On Trauma’ (Taylor and Francis, 2011).


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