Posts Tagged ‘solar’
Barefoot science students make tricycle using solar energy
In Uncategorized on October 13, 2010 at 7:55 amThe Da Nang Poly-technique University was abuzz with admiration for three “barefoot science” students who designed and built a tricycle using solar energy.
The group of students and teacher stand by the new vehicle (Photo; SGGP)
Ta Ngoc Thien Binh, Huynh Kim Trang and Pham Nguyen Son of the Mechanic Department of the university, invested their own money to research and develop the new product because they felt sorry for tricycle drivers, who had to work in the scorching sun in central Vietnam.
The three barefoot science students said the biggest difficulty getting a hold of the design document. They journeyed to Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong delta province of Can Tho to learn more about the machine.
Their efforts paid off after two months, when they finished the vehicle model with the zealous assistance of teacher Duong Viet Dung. They then had to overcome financial barriers. Upon hearing the group’s story, teachers, the Mechanic department and their families decided to help the ambitious students to make their dream come true.
The newly invented vehicle ran on June 15. The 350-kilogram tricycle, named Solar Car C4, has two seats; and is capable of achieving a maximum speed of 30 kilometers an hour. Its electrical charge lasts for 30 kilometers, but most importantly, it can utilize gas when it is out of electricity or if it is cloudy.
Its design is small, making it suitable for tourist service in the central city of Da Nang, which intends to become an environmentally friendly city. It is also perfect for the UNESCO-recognized natural heritage site of Hoi An town, which ban vehicles with engines, said Thien Binh.
The Solar Car C4 won second prize at the competition launched in 2009 by the Communist Youth Union and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. The barefoot science students have entered their product to the “Student conduct scientific research” contest and the Competition for Creativeness of adolescents & children nationwide 2010.
The cost of Solar Car C4 is over VND80 million. The group expects a motor company to invest in it and improve aspects of its technical design to produce a fleet of solar tricycles in Da Nang.
Source: SGGP
Barefoot science students make tricycle using solar energy
In Uncategorized on August 12, 2010 at 11:20 amThe Da Nang Poly-technique University was abuzz with admiration for three “barefoot science” students who designed and built a tricycle using solar energy.
The group of students and teacher stand by the new vehicle (Photo; SGGP)
Ta Ngoc Thien Binh, Huynh Kim Trang and Pham Nguyen Son of the Mechanic Department of the university, invested their own money to research and develop the new product because they felt sorry for tricycle drivers, who had to work in the scorching sun in central Vietnam.
The three barefoot science students said the biggest difficulty getting a hold of the design document. They journeyed to Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong delta province of Can Tho to learn more about the machine.
Their efforts paid off after two months, when they finished the vehicle model with the zealous assistance of teacher Duong Viet Dung. They then had to overcome financial barriers. Upon hearing the group’s story, teachers, the Mechanic department and their families decided to help the ambitious students to make their dream come true.
The newly invented vehicle ran on June 15. The 350-kilogram tricycle, named Solar Car C4, has two seats; and is capable of achieving a maximum speed of 30 kilometers an hour. Its electrical charge lasts for 30 kilometers, but most importantly, it can utilize gas when it is out of electricity or if it is cloudy.
Its design is small, making it suitable for tourist service in the central city of Da Nang, which intends to become an environmentally friendly city. It is also perfect for the UNESCO-recognized natural heritage site of Hoi An town, which ban vehicles with engines, said Thien Binh.
The Solar Car C4 won second prize at the competition launched in 2009 by the Communist Youth Union and the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment. The barefoot science students have entered their product to the “Student conduct scientific research” contest and the Competition for Creativeness of adolescents & children nationwide 2010.
The cost of Solar Car C4 is over VND80 million. The group expects a motor company to invest in it and improve aspects of its technical design to produce a fleet of solar tricycles in Da Nang.
Source: SGGP
Solar plane’s night flight delayed by technical problem
In Uncategorized on July 1, 2010 at 2:25 pmPAYERNE, Switzerland, July 1, 2010 (AFP) – A pioneering attempt to fly an experimental aircraft, Solar Impulse, though the night powered by nothing but the sun has been postponed due to a technical issue, organisers said Thursday.
“A failure occurred in a critical piece in the plane,” Swiss adventurer Bertrand Piccard, the venture’s founder and previously the first balloonist to circumnavigate the globe, told a press conference.
View taken on July 1, 2010 of an aircraft dubbed Solar Impulse, HB-SIA prototype in a warehouse in Payerne. AFP
His spokesman told AFP that he was referring to an item of navigational equipment which broke down on Wednesday night.
The ultra-light aircraft, flown by joint founder Andre Borschberg, had been set to take off from the Payerne airbase in Switzerland early Thursday and then fly for 24 hours through the day and the night.
The single seater clad with solar panels, which weighs little more than a saloon car but bears the wingspan of an Airbus A340 airliner, has completed 10 test flights since it first hopped along a runway seven months ago.
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Source: SGGP
First hospital uses solar energy in Vietnam
In Uncategorized on June 22, 2010 at 4:36 pmThe Tam Ky Heathcare Centre in the central province of Quang Nam has put into use a solar energy system to supplement the limited electricity source from the national grid.
With the system, the 100-bed healthcare centre has become the first hospital in Vietnam using solar energy.
The 25-cell solar system is capable of generating some 7,200 kWh each year, meeting electricity demand by the centre’s emergency ward.
The system will help ensure the power supply for the centre’s operation during the hot season when the electricity flow from the national grid is often unstable, said the centre’s officials.
The system costing 720 million VND is half funded by the Spanish government.
Source: VNA
Source: QDND
Dong Nai gets solar traffic lights
In Uncategorized on May 20, 2010 at 5:10 pmThe southern province of Dong Nai has installed 76 traffic lights using solar energy.
Duong Danh Quy, head of the province’s Traffic Safety Committee said the province was the first in the country to use solar panels to supply power for traffic lights.
“During the trial, the traffic lights were as reliable as traffic lights wired to the power supply and constituted a valuable energy saving for Bien Hoa city,” he said.
The plan was initiated in 2007 by the committee and piloted in several places around the city.
The solar powered posts have been installed on national highways 1A, 51, 20 in the province and on some city streets.
Quy said the posts have capacity to store enough power for two days’ operation and they are easy to install, because they require no excavation of the road surface.
The cost for a post is around 120 million VND (6,282 USD), taken from the committee’s fund from traffic fines.
Quy said solar powered posts would replace all public grid wired posts in the near future. He called for other provinces to follow Dong Nai’s model.
Source: VNA
Source: QDND
Solar power grid to kick off in June
In Uncategorized on April 15, 2010 at 4:19 amThe first rural, solar-power grid in the central province of Quang Binh will be installed under an agreement signed earlier this week by Schneider Electric Vietnam and the province.
The Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) pilot project will be jointly sponsored by Quang Binh, Energy Assistance France, and the Schneider Electric Foundation.
More than 35 households will benefit from the solar power station that is connected to an independent mini-grid system.
The project, which is expected to begin generating power by the end of June, will be run like a non-profit business.
If successful, similar projects could be deployed on a wider scale and assisted by preferred loan schemes that would provided by international funding, said Country President of Schneider Electric Vietnam, Oliver Jacquet.
“I hope the project is a great step toward sustainable economic development for the remote, rural areas in Vietnam,” said Jacquet.
This project is part of Bip-Bop programme that has been initiated by Schneider Electronic to bring green, clean, safe and sustainable electricity to 1.6 billion people in the world, who still have no access to energy.
Source: VNA
Source: QDND
Japan eyes solar station in space
In Uncategorized on November 9, 2009 at 4:51 amIt may sound like a sci-fi vision, but Japan’s space agency is dead serious: by 2030 it wants to collect solar power in space and zap it down to Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.
The government has just picked a group of companies and a team of researchers tasked with turning the ambitious, multi-billion-dollar dream of unlimited clean energy into reality in coming decades.
With few energy resources of its own and heavily reliant on oil imports, Japan has long been a leader in solar and other renewable energies and this year set ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets.
But Japan’s boldest plan to date is the Space Solar Power System (SSPS), in which arrays of photovoltaic dishes several square kilometres (square miles) in size would hover in geostationary orbit outside the Earth’s atmosphere.
“Since solar power is a clean and inexhaustible energy source, we believe that this system will be able to help solve the problems of energy shortage and global warming,” researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, one of the project participants, wrote in a report.
“The sun’s rays abound in space.”
The solar cells would capture the solar energy, which is at least five times stronger in space than on Earth, and beam it down to the ground through clusters of lasers or microwaves.
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| This file graphic illustration released from Japan’s Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer (USEF) shows a system of space solar power system (SSPS) which consists of a large solar power generator and transmission panel |
These would be collected by gigantic parabolic antennae, likely to be located in restricted areas at sea or on dam reservoirs, said Tadashige Takiya, a spokesman at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA).
The researchers are targeting a one gigawatt system, equivalent to a medium-sized atomic power plant, that would produce electricity at eight yen (cents) per kilowatt-hour, six times cheaper than its current cost in Japan.
The challenge — including transporting the components to space — may appear gigantic, but Japan has been pursuing the project since 1998, with some 130 researchers studying it under JAXA’s oversight.
Last month Japan’s Economy and Trade Ministry and the Science Ministry took another step toward making the project a reality, by selecting several Japanese high-tech giants as participants in the project.
The consortium, named the Institute for Unmanned Space Experiment Free Flyer, also includes Mitsubishi Electric, NEC, Fujitsu and Sharp.
The project’s roadmap outlined several steps that would need to be taken before a full-blown launch in 2030.
Within several years, “a satellite designed to test the transmission by microwave should be put into low orbit with a Japanese rocket,” said Tatsuhito Fujita, one of the JAXA researchers heading the project.
The next step, expected around 2020, would be to launch and test a large flexible photovoltaic structure with 10 megawatt power capacity, to be followed by a 250 megawatt prototype.
This would help evaluate the project’s financial viability, say officials. The final aim is to produce electricity cheap enough to compete with other alternative energy sources.
JAXA says the transmission technology would be safe but concedes it would have to convince the public, which may harbour images of laser beams shooting down from the sky, roasting birds or slicing up aircraft in mid-air.
According to a 2004 study by JAXA, the words ‘laser’ and ‘microwave’ caused the most concern among the 1,000 people questioned.
Source: SGGP
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Tien Giang joins Japanese group in researching solar energy
In Uncategorized on November 28, 2008 at 5:01 pmTien Giang (VNA) – The Mekong Delta province of Tien Giang and Japan ’s Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT) Group have agreed to cooperate in two projects researching application of solar energy.
Their aim is to produce mobile phone chargers using solar cell technology and environmental observation equipment powered by solar energy.
The Tan Huong Industrial Park has been selected for the production.-
