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Smart Power and Water for Challenging Environments The supply of energy and clean water to remote locations, such as desert facilities, farming operations, resorts, and small villages in the developing world can be logistically complex and expensive. This project would explore the feasibility, design and control of small smart power units to provide clean water and energy to remote sites by using solar power and portable reverse osmosis units, such as those shown conceptually in the Figure.
Figure: A simple mobile solar powered reverse osmosis system This work will focus on four main areas to make solar energy practical for these relatively small-scale applications: modular design methodologies for photovoltaic systems, robust system design, optimal smart control, and the design and manufacture of robust and low cost collectors and concentrators for challenging environments. Small-scale photovoltaic systems require tailored designs, and must be fabricated to meet the specific demands of an application and its location. Unfortunately, custom designed systems are generally expensive and require significant expertise. As the price of photovoltaic cells decrease, the work associated with the design and assembly of these systems is becoming an increasingly significant portion of the system cost. In order to reduce the cost, systems will need to be assembled from inventories of standard components and subsystems that can be cost-effectively mass-produced. For a given inventory of available modules there are a very large number of possible combinations to be considered. The analysis required to best configure a system would be beyond the expertise that is likely to found in many parts of the world. Developing design rules, algorithms and software to optimally configure these systems will be a major component of this research. A second area of research is the robust design and control of photovoltaic systems. Photovoltaic systems will need to controlled in a fashion that optimizes the full system performance despite the fact that individual elements might not be operating in their optimal ranges. When external energy storage devices are eliminated from the system, the optimal control problem becomes even more complex. These systems will need to be controlled when there are stochastic inputs such as changing solar insolation or system demand. These stochastic properties of the application and location also need to be considered during the design, and this will be a major area of research. The third area of research is the design and manufacture of robust and low cost collectors and concentrators. With the currently available technology, fabrication costs can be excessive when designed for a custom system. Also, the current technologies degrade when used in challenging environments and they require substantial maintenance increasing their life cycle costs. New solar collector design concepts and manufacturing technologies can potentially significantly reduce the total lifetime cost of these devices. Approaches which will be considered include: using modular design techniques to reduce the initial construction cost, using new materials to improve performance and system life, adaptive structures and intelligent controls to enhance performance, and design for easy maintenance in challenging environments. In support of these three research topics, a small-scale photovoltaic powered reverse osmosis unit, being designed and built at MIT, would be used. This system will be fully instrumented and will be intelligently controlled using optimal control techniques that will be developed during the course of the project. This test bed will demonstrate the advantages of optimally designing and controlling a solar-powered system. This project requires experience in electromechanical design, controls and experimental work.
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