Related papers: Origami Inspired Solar Panel Design
Origami as a deployable structure offers the unique advantage of achieving compact stowage via flat-folding while forming a well-defined surface composed of rigid panels upon deployment. However, since origami consists of flat facets, it is…
As climate change intensifies, the global imperative to shift towards sustainable energy sources becomes more pronounced. Photovoltaic (PV) energy is a favored choice due to its reliability and ease of installation. Accurate mapping of PV…
Maintaining the integrity of solar power plants is a vital component in dealing with the current climate crisis. This process begins with analysts creating a detailed map of a plant with the coordinates of every solar panel, making it…
We present a case study for how AI coding systems can be used to generate novel scientific hypotheses. We combine a generic coding agent (Google's AntiGravity) with an LLM-driven tree search algorithm (Empirical Research Assistance / ERA)…
The cover glass in a silicon solar panel accounts for about 2/3 of the device's weight. Recycling these devices at their end-of-life is fundamental to reducing the industry's environmental impact. Here we investigate the recovery of these…
This invention deals with the broad general concept for focussing light. A mini-optics tracking and focussing system is presented for solar power conversion that ranges from an individual's portable system to solar conversion of electrical…
Solar panels are increasingly deployed in cities on rooftops, walls, and urban infrastructure. Although the panel costs have fallen in recent years, the soft costs of installing them have not. These soft costs include assessing the…
This work harnesses interpretable machine learning methods to address the challenging inverse design problem of origami-inspired systems. We show that a decision tree-random forest method is particularly suitable for fitting origami…
Solar-thermal evaporation, a traditional steam generation method for solar desalination, has received numerous attentions in recent years due to the significant increase in efficiency by adopting interfacial evaporation. While most of the…
In this paper, we study how to fold a specified origami crease pattern in order to minimize the impact of paper thickness. Specifically, origami designs are often expressed by a mountain-valley pattern (plane graph of creases with relative…
Considering the intermittency of renewable energy systems, a sizing and scheduling model is proposed for a finite number of static electric loads. The model objective is to maximize solar energy utilization with and without storage. For the…
Origami is an ancient art that continues to yield both artistic and scientific insights to this day. In 2012, Buhler, Butler, de Launey, and Graham extended these ideas even further by developing a mathematical construction inspired by…
Solar energy is used for many mission-critical applications including space exploration, sensor systems to monitor wildfires, etc. Their operation can be limited or even terminated if solar panels are covered with dust or hit by space…
Designing a robot or structure that can fold itself into a target shape is a process that involves challenges originated from multiple sources. For example, the designer of rigid self-folding robots must consider foldability from geometric…
An important parameter that affects PV panel performance of a solar power system is the incident solar radiation with the panel or panel's area of exposure to the sun. The direction and tilt angle of a PV panel are two important factors in…
An efficient way to introduce elastic energy that can bias an origami structure toward desired shapes is to allow curved tiles between the creases. The bending of the tiles supplies the energy and the tiles themselves may have additional…
The variability of solar energy in off-grid systems dictates the sizing of energy storage systems along with the sizing and scheduling of loads present in the off-grid system. Unfortunately, energy storage may be costly, while frequent…
Why is it difficult to refold a previously folded sheet of paper? We show that even crease patterns with only one designed folding motion inevitably contain an exponential number of `distractor' folding branches accessible from a…
Environmentally-powered computer systems operate on renewable energy harvested from their environment, such as solar or wind, and stored in batteries. While harvesting environmental energy has long been necessary for small-scale embedded…
This paper is concerned with a shape optimization problem, where the functional to be maximized describes the total sunlight collected by a distribution of tree leaves, minus the cost for transporting water and nutrient from the base of the…