Assessing implementation of low-carbon technologies in Thekelan Hamlet, Indonesia using participatory rural appraisal method

Thekelan hamlet is located at the foot of Mount Merbabu makes the electricity that reaches this village experience a reasonably high loss percentage. By utilizing the sunlight, the community can make a power plant with solar cell technology. In addition, the majority of residents in Thekelan Hamlet still use wood-fired stoves for cooking. This condition is, of course, not environmentally friendly because the combustion releases high carbon into the atmosphere. Therefore, the prospect of renewable energy has not yet been fully exploited. This situation is due to the low level of knowledge, education, and capital owned by residents. The Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) approach were used to develop low-carbon society in Thekelan Hamlet. This approach comprises three stage including workshop, action, and reflection stage. Result shows that the community in Thekelan District were able to implement low-carbon society. However, the capital price of low-carbon technology such as solar cells and dew catcher is still high with respect to the output that they can generate. Therefore, the community is agree to contribute and join to the development of this program in the future since they realize that low-carbon society can induce economic development of the hamlet.

System-Independent Irradiance Sensorless ANN-Based MPPT for Photovoltaic Systems in Electric Vehicles

The integration of photovoltaic systems (PVS) in electric vehicles (EV) increases the vehicle’s autonomy by providing an additional energy source other than the battery. However, current solar cell technology generates around 200 W for a 1.4 m2 panel (to be installed on the roof of the EV) at stable irradiance conditions. This limitation in production and the sudden changes in irradiance produced by shadows of clouds, buildings, and other structures make developing a fast and efficient maximum power point tracking (MPPT) technique in this area necessary. This article proposes an artificial neural network (ANN)-based MPPT, called DS-ANN, that uses manufacturer datasheet parameters as inputs to the network to address this problem. The Bayesian backpropagation-regularization performs the training, ensuring that the MPPT technique operates satisfactorily on different PVS without retraining. We simulated the response of 20 commercial modules against actual irradiance data to validate the proposed method. The results show that our method achieves an average tracking efficiency of 99.66%, improving by 1.21% over an enhanced P&O method.

ANALYSIS OF KNOWLEDGE OF PHYSICS EDUCATION STUDENTS ABOUT SOLAR CELL UTILIZATION TECHNOLOGY

The purpose of this study was to determine the knowledge in critical thinking of physics education students about the use of solar cell technology. This study uses a qualitative approach. The subjects in this study were 40 students of physics education at the University of Jember. Critical thinking indicators that must be studied are analysis, explanation, interpretation, evaluation, inference, and self-regulation. The research instrument used a test given via google form. The results showed that the percentage of students who were able to answer questions correctly was still relatively low. This shows that the knowledge of physics education students at the University of Jember about solar cell energy is still very lacking.

Hierarchical carrier transport simulator for defected nanoparticle solids

The efficiency of nanoparticle (NP) solar cells has grown impressively in recent years, exceeding 16%. However, the carrier mobility in NP solar cells, and in other optoelectronic applications remains low, thus critically limiting their performance. Therefore, carrier transport in NP solids needs to be better understood to further improve the overall efficiency of NP solar cell technology. However, it is technically challenging to simulate experimental scale samples, as physical processes from atomic to mesoscopic scales all crucially impact transport. To rise to this challenge, here we report the development of TRIDENS: the Transport in Defected Nanoparticle Solids Simulator, that adds three more hierarchical layers to our previously developed HINTS code for nanoparticle solar cells. In TRIDENS, we first introduced planar defects, such as twin planes and grain boundaries into individual NP SLs superlattices (SLs) that comprised the order of 103 NPs. Then we used HINTS to simulate the transport across tens of thousands of defected NP SLs, and constructed the distribution of the NP SL mobilities with planar defects. Second, the defected NP SLs were assembled into a resistor network with more than 104 NP SLs, thus representing about 107 individual NPs. Finally, the TRIDENS results were analyzed by finite size scaling to explore whether the percolation transition, separating the phase where the low mobility defected NP SLs percolate, from the phase where the high mobility undefected NP SLs percolate drives a low-mobility-to-highmobility transport crossover that can be extrapolated to genuinely macroscopic length scales. For the theoretical description, we adapted the Efros-Shklovskii bimodal mobility distribution percolation model. We demonstrated that the ES bimodal theory’s two-variable scaling function is an effective tool to quantitatively characterize this low-mobility-to-high-mobility transport crossover.

Studying the Effect of High Substrate Temperature on the Microstructure of Vacuum Evaporated TAPC: C60 Organic Solar Thin Films

Organic solar cells (OSCs), also known as organic photovoltaics (OPVs), are an emerging solar cell technology composed of carbon-based, organic molecules, which convert energy from the sun into electricity. Key for their performance is the microstructure of the light-absorbing organic bulk heterojunction. To study this, organic solar films composed of both fullerene C60 as electron acceptor and different mole percentages of di-[4-(N,N-di-p-tolyl-amino)-phenyl]-cyclohexane (TAPC) as electron donor were evaporated in vacuum in different mixing ratios (5, 50 and 95 mol%) on an ITO-coated glass substrate held at room temperature and at 110 °C. The microstructure of the C60: TAPC heterojunction was studied by grazing incidence wide angle X-ray scattering to understand the effect of substrate heating. By increasing the substrate temperature from ambient to 110 °C, it was found that no significant change was observed in the crystal size for the C60: TAPC concentrations investigated in this study. In addition to the variation done in the substrate temperature, the variation of the mole percent of the donor (TAPC) was studied to conclude the effect of both the substrate temperature and the donor concentration on the microstructure of the OSC films. Bragg peaks were attributed to C60 in the pure C60 sample and in the blend with low donor mole percentage (5%), but the C60 peaks became nondiscernible when the donor mole percentage was increased to 50% and above, showing that TAPC interrupted the formation of C60 crystals.