White Cliffs Solar Power Station
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White Cliffs Solar Power Station
White Cliffs Solar Power Station was Australia's first solar power station. It is located at White Cliffs, New South Wales, which was chosen as it has the highest insolation in New South Wales, and in 1981 when the station was constructed had no grid connection. Constructed by a team from Australian National University, the station consisted of fourteen five-metre parabolic dishes, each covered by more than 2000 mirrors and mounted on a heliostatic mounting. The dishes each focussed the sun's rays on a collector, where water was boiled. The resulting steam drove a three-cylinder Uniflow steam engine, made by modifying a Lister diesel engine, delivering up to 25kWe. Batteries were used to provide 24-hour power to selected buildings in the township, and an existing diesel generator retained to provide battery charging when either low insolation or strong winds prevented use of the solar station for extended periods. In 1996, following grid connection of the township, the stati ...
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Australia
Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, smaller islands. With an area of , Australia is the largest country by area in Oceania and the world's List of countries and dependencies by area, sixth-largest country. Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent, with the least fertile soils. It is a Megadiverse countries, megadiverse country, and its size gives it a wide variety of landscapes and climates, with Deserts of Australia, deserts in the centre, tropical Forests of Australia, rainforests in the north-east, and List of mountains in Australia, mountain ranges in the south-east. The ancestors of Aboriginal Australians began arriving from south east Asia approximately Early human migrations#Nearby Oceania, 65,000 years ago, during the Last Glacial Period, last i ...
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Uniflow Steam Engine
The uniflow type of steam engine uses steam that flows in one direction only in each half of the cylinder. Thermal efficiency is increased by having a temperature gradient along the cylinder. Steam always enters at the hot ends of the cylinder and exhausts through ports at the cooler centre. By this means, the relative heating and cooling of the cylinder walls is reduced. Design details Steam entry is usually controlled by poppet valves (which act similarly to those used in internal combustion engines) that are operated by a camshaft. The inlet valves open to admit steam when minimum expansion volume has been reached at the start of the stroke. For a period of the crank cycle, steam is admitted, and the poppet inlet is then closed, allowing continued expansion of the steam during the stroke, driving the piston. Near the end of the stroke, the piston will uncover a ring of exhaust ports mounted radially around the centre of the cylinder. These ports are connected by a manifold an ...
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University Of Wollongong
The University of Wollongong (abbreviated as UOW) is an Australian public research university located in the coastal city of Wollongong, New South Wales, approximately 80 kilometres south of Sydney. As of 2017, the university had an enrolment of more than 32,000 students (including over 12,800 international students from 134 countries), an alumni base of more than 131,859 and over 2,400 staff members. In 1951, a division of the New South Wales University of Technology (known as the University of New South Wales from 1958) was established in Wollongong for the conduct of diploma courses. In 1961, the Wollongong University College of the University of New South Wales was constituted and the college was officially opened in 1962. In 1975 the University of Wollongong was established as an independent institution. Since its establishment, the university has conferred more than 120,000 degrees, diplomas and certificates. Its students, originally predominantly from the local Illawarra r ...
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Broken Hill
Broken Hill is an inland mining city in the far west of outback New South Wales, Australia. It is near the border with South Australia on the crossing of the Barrier Highway (A32) and the Silver City Highway (B79), in the Barrier Range. It is 315m above sea level, with a hot desert climate, and an average rainfall of 235mm. The closest major city is Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, which is more than 500km to the southwest and linked via route A32. The town is prominent in Australia's mining, industrial relations and economic history after the discovery of silver ore led to the opening of various mines, thus establishing Broken Hill's recognition as a prosperous mining town well into the 1990s. Despite experiencing a slowing economic situation into the late 1990s and 2000s, Broken Hill itself was listed on the National Heritage List in 2015 and remains Australia's longest running mining town. Broken Hill, historically considered one of Australia's boomtowns, has be ...
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The Barrier Miner
''The Barrier Miner'' was a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Broken Hill in far western New South Wales from 1888 to 1974. History First published on 28 February 1888, ''The Barrier Miner'' was published continuously until 25 November 1974. Copies are available on microfilm and online via Trove Digitised Newspapers. The paper was revived briefly in 2005; an index to births deaths and marriages has been prepared which also notes additional publication dates between 16 December 2005 and 31 July 2008. The paper closed down for a second time in 2008 with the managing director, Margaret McBride stating that "...due to commercial reasons the paper would no longer service Broken Hill and the region...". ''The Barrier Miner'' served the growing mining community of Broken Hill, when the area was found to have lead ore and traces of silver. It was not until late 1884 or early 1885 that rich quantities of silver were found and the Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP) was floated ...
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Engineers Australia
Engineers Australia (EA) is an Australian professional body and not-for-profit organisation whose purpose is to advance the science and practice of engineering for the benefit of the community. Engineers Australia is Australia's recognized organization for accreditation of professional engineering qualifications under the Washington Accord. As of 2022, EA has 115,000 members, which includes 31,000 students. History The organisation began after World War I, following recognition of the need for a single body to represent engineers, rather than the numerous smaller organisations that existed then. The first council meeting was held in 1919, electing Professor William Warren of the University of Sydney as the first President.Lloyd, B E (1968) ''The Education of Professional Engineers in Australia'', APEA Melbourne.Lloyd, B E (1988) "In Search of Identity: Engineering in Australia 1788–1988", Thesis for Doctor of Philosophy, University of Melbourne On 1 May 1926 the Institutio ...
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Photovoltaic Cell
A solar cell, or photovoltaic cell, is an electronic device that converts the energy of light directly into electricity by the photovoltaic effect, which is a physics, physical and Chemical substance, chemical phenomenon.Solar Cells
chemistryexplained.com
It is a form of photoelectric cell, defined as a device whose electrical characteristics, such as Electric current, current, voltage, or Electrical resistance and conductance, resistance, vary when exposed to light. Individual solar cell devices are often the electrical building blocks of solar panel, photovoltaic modules, known colloquially as solar panels. The common single junction silicon solar cell can produce a maximum open-circuit voltage of approximately 0.5 volts to 0.6volts. Solar cells are described as being Photovoltaics, photovoltaic, irrespe ...
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Photovoltaic
Photovoltaics (PV) is the conversion of light into electricity using semiconducting materials that exhibit the photovoltaic effect, a phenomenon studied in physics, photochemistry, and electrochemistry. The photovoltaic effect is commercially used for electricity generation and as photosensors. A photovoltaic system employs solar modules, each comprising a number of solar cells, which generate electrical power. PV installations may be ground-mounted, rooftop-mounted, wall-mounted or floating. The mount may be fixed or use a solar tracker to follow the sun across the sky. Photovoltaic technology helps to mitigate climate change because it emits much less carbon dioxide than fossil fuels. Solar PV has specific advantages as an energy source: once installed, its operation generates no pollution and no greenhouse gas emissions, it shows scalability in respect of power needs and silicon has large availability in the Earth's crust, although other materials required in PV system man ...
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Diesel Engine
The diesel engine, named after Rudolf Diesel, is an internal combustion engine in which ignition of the fuel is caused by the elevated temperature of the air in the cylinder due to mechanical compression; thus, the diesel engine is a so-called compression-ignition engine (CI engine). This contrasts with engines using spark plug-ignition of the air-fuel mixture, such as a petrol engine (gasoline engine) or a gas engine (using a gaseous fuel like natural gas or liquefied petroleum gas). Diesel engines work by compressing only air, or air plus residual combustion gases from the exhaust (known as exhaust gas recirculation (EGR)). Air is inducted into the chamber during the intake stroke, and compressed during the compression stroke. This increases the air temperature inside the cylinder to such a high degree that atomised diesel fuel injected into the combustion chamber ignites. With the fuel being injected into the air just before combustion, the dispersion of the fuel is une ...
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Solar Thermal Collector
A solar thermal collector collects heat by absorbing sunlight. The term "solar collector" commonly refers to a device for solar hot water heating, but may refer to large power generating installations such as solar parabolic troughs and solar towers or non water heating devices such as solar air heaters. Solar thermal collectors are either non-concentrating or concentrating. In non-concentrating collectors, the aperture area (i.e., the area that receives the solar radiation) is roughly the same as the absorber area (i.e., the area absorbing the radiation). A common example of such a system is a metal plate that is painted a dark color to maximize the absorption of sunlight. The energy is then collected by cooling the plate with a working fluid, often water or glycol running in pipes attached to the plate. Concentrating collectors have a much larger aperture than the absorber area. The aperture is typically in the form of a mirror that is focussed on the absorber, which in mo ...
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Solar Power
Solar power is the conversion of energy from sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaics (PV) or indirectly using concentrated solar power. Photovoltaic cells convert light into an electric current using the photovoltaic effect. Concentrated solar power systems use lenses or mirrors and solar tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight to a hot spot, often to drive a steam turbine. Photovoltaics were initially solely used as a source of electricity for small and medium-sized applications, from the calculator powered by a single solar cell to remote homes powered by an off-grid rooftop PV system. Commercial concentrated solar power plants were first developed in the 1980s. Since then, as the cost of solar electricity has fallen, grid-connected solar PV systems have grown more or less exponentially. Millions of installations and gigawatt-scale photovoltaic power stations continue to be built, with half of new generation capacity being solar in 2021. ...
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Heliostat
A heliostat (from ''helios'', the Greek word for ''sun'', and ''stat'', as in stationary) is a device that includes a mirror, usually a plane mirror, which turns so as to keep reflecting sunlight toward a predetermined target, compensating for the sun's apparent motions in the sky. The target may be a physical object, distant from the heliostat, or a direction in space. To do this, the reflective surface of the mirror is kept perpendicular to the bisector of the angle between the directions of the sun and the target as seen from the mirror. In almost every case, the target is stationary relative to the heliostat, so the light is reflected in a fixed direction. According to contemporary sources the heliostata, as it was called at first, was invented by Willem 's Gravesande (1688–1742). Other contenders are Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679) and Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736). A Heliostat designed by George Johnstone Storey is in the Science Museum Group collec ...
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