A solar updraft tower power plant (solar tower) is a solar thermal power plant that utilizes a combination of solar

air collector and central updraft tube to generate an induced convective flow which drives pressure staged turbines to generate electricity.

 This paper presents practical results of a prototype of a solar chimney with thermal mass, where the glass surface is replaced by transparence plastic cover. The study focused on chimney's basements kind effect on collected air temperatures. Three basements were used: concrete, black concrete and black pebbles basements. The study was conducted in Baghdad from August to November 2009.

The results show that the best chimney efficiency attaine

In this work, a novel design for the NiO/TiO2 heterojunction solar cells is presented. Highly-pure nanopowders prepared by dc reactive magnetron sputtering technique were used to form the heterojunctions. The electrical characteristics of the proposed design were compared to those of a conventional thin film heterojunction design prepared by the same technique. A higher efficiency of 300% was achieved by the proposed design. This attempt can be considered as the first to fabricate solar cells from highly-pure nanopowders of two different semiconductors.

This paper describes the problem of online autonomous mobile robot path planning, which is consisted of finding optimal paths or trajectories for an autonomous mobile robot from a starting point to a destination across a flat map of a terrain, represented by a 2-D workspace. An enhanced algorithm for solving the problem of path planning using Bacterial Foraging Optimization algorithm is presented. This nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithm, which imitates the foraging behavior of E-coli bacteria, was used to find the optimal path from a starting point to a target point. The proposed algorithm was demonstrated by simulations in both static and dynamic different environments. A comparative study was evaluated between the developed algori

Nowadays, Wheeled Mobile Robots (WMRs) have found many applications as industry, transportation, inspection, and other fields. Therefore, the trajectory tracking control of the nonholonomic wheeled mobile robots have an important problem. This work focus on the application of model-based on Fractional Order  PI^aD^b (FOPID) controller for trajectory tracking problem. The control algorithm based on the errors in postures of mobile robot which feed to FOPID controller to generate correction signals that transport to  torque for each driven wheel, and by means of dynamics model of mobile robot these torques used to compute the linear and angular speed to reach the desired pose. In this work a dynamics model of

The flexible joint robot manipulators provide various benefits, but also present many control challenges such as nonlinearities, strong coupling, vibration, etc. This paper proposes optimal second order integral sliding mode control (OSOISMC) for a single link flexible joint manipulator to achieve robust and smooth performance. Firstly, the integral sliding mode control is designed, which consists of a linear quadratic regulator (LQR) as a nominal control, and switching control. This control guarantees the system robustness for the entire process. Then, a nonsingularterminal sliding surface is added to give a second order integral sliding mode control (SOISMC), which reduces chartering effect and gives the finite time convergence as well. S

This paper presents a modified training method for Recurrent Neural Networks. This method depends on the Non linear Auto Regressive (NARX) model with Modified Wavelet Function as activation function (MSLOG) in the hidden layer. The modified model is known as Modified Recurrent Neural (MRN). It is used for identification Forward dynamics of four Degrees of Freedom (4-DOF) Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) manipulator robot. This model is also used in the design of Direct Inverse Control (DIC). This method is compared with Recurrent Neural Networks that used Sigmoid activation function (RS) in the hidden layer and Recurrent Neural Networks with Wavelet activation function (RW). Simulation results shows that the MRN model is bett

This paper discusses an optimal path planning algorithm based on an Adaptive Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm (AMOPSO) for two case studies. First case, single robot wants to reach a goal in the static environment that contain two obstacles and two danger source. The second one, is improving the ability for five robots to reach the shortest way. The proposed algorithm solves the optimization problems for the first case by finding the minimum distance from initial to goal position and also ensuring that the generated path has a maximum distance from the danger zones. And for the second case, finding the shortest path for every robot and without any collision between them with the shortest time. In ord