Wear of metals

Phenomenon of wear in Metals

Wear of Metals

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Solar Thermal Systems

Solar Thermal Systems

Parabolic troughs, like these used in Colorado, concentrate the sun's energy to great temperatures.There are two types of solar thermal systems: passive and active. A passive system requires no equipment, like when heat builds up inside your car when it's left parked in the sun. An active system requires some way to absorb and collect solar radiation and then store it.

Solar thermal power plants are active systems, and while there are a few types, there are a few basic similarities: Mirrors reflect and concentrate sunlight, and receivers collect that solar energy and convert it into heat energy. A generator can then be used to produce electricity from this heat energy.

The most common type of solar thermal power plants, including those plants in California's Mojave Desert, use a parabolic trough design to collect the sun's radiation. These collectors are known as linear concentrator systems, and the largest are able to generate 80 megawatts of electricity [source: U.S. Department of Energy]. They are shaped like a half-pipe you'd see used for snowboarding or skateboarding, and have linear, parabolic-shaped reflectors covered with more than 900,000 mirrors that are north-south aligned and able to pivot to follow the sun as it moves east to west during the day. Because of its shape, this type of plant can reach operating temperatures of about 750 degrees F (400 degrees C), concentrating the sun's rays at 30 to 100 times their normal intensity onto heat-transfer-fluid or water/steam filled pipes [source: Energy Information Administration]. The hot fluid is used to produce steam, and the steam then spins a turbine that powers a generator to make electricity.

While parabolic trough designs can run at full power as solar energy plants, they're more often used as a solar and fossil fuel hybrid, adding fossil fuel capability as backup.

Solar power tower systems are another type of solar thermal system. Power towers rely on thousands of heliostats, which are large, flat sun-tracking mirrors, to focus and concentrate the sun's radiation onto a single tower-mounted receiver. Like parabolic troughs, heat-transfer fluid or water/steam is heated in the receiver (power towers, though, are able to concentrate the sun's energy as much as 1,500 times), eventually converted to steam and used to produce electricity with a turbine and generator.

Power tower designs are still in development but could one day be realized as grid-connected power plants producing about 200 megawatts of electricity per tower.

A third system is the solar dish/engine. Compared to the parabolic trough and power towers, dish systems are small producers (about 3 to 25 kilowatts). There are two main components: the solar concentrator (the dish) and the power conversion unit (the engine/generator). The dish is pointed at and tracks the sun and collects solar energy; it's able to concentrate that energy by about 2,000 times. A thermal receiver, a series of tubes filled with a cooling fluid (such as hydrogen or helium), sits between the dish and the engine. It absorbs the concentrated solar energy from the dish, converts it to heat and sends that heat to the engine where it becomes electricity.

Introduction to Solar Thermal Systems

Introduction to Solar Thermal Systems

Most of us don't think much about where our electricity comes from, only that it's available and plentiful. Electricity generated by burning fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, emits carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides -- gases scientists believe contribute to climate change. Solar thermal (heat) energy is a carbon-free, renewable alternative to the power we generate with fossil fuels like coal and gas. This isn't a thing of the future, either. Between 1984 and 1991, the United States built nine such plants in California's Mojave Desert, and today they continue to provide a combined capacity of 354 megawatts annually, power used in 500,000 Californian homes [source: Hutchinson]. Reliable power, at that. In 2008 when six days of peak demand buckled the power grid and brought electricity outages in California, those solar thermal plants continued to produce at 110 percent capacity [source: Kanellos].

Wondering where the technology's been since then? In the 1990s when prices of natural gas dropped, so did interest in solar thermal power. Today, though, the technology is poised for a comeback. It's estimated by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratories that solar thermal power could provide hundreds of gigawatts of electricity, equal to more than 10 percent of demand in the United States [source: LaMonica].

Shake the image of solar panels from your head -- that kind of demand is going to require power plants. There are two main ways of generating energy from the sun. Photovoltaic (PV) and concentrating solar thermal (CST), also known as concentrating solar power (CSP) technologies.

PV converts sunlight directly into electricity. These solar cells are usually found powering devices such as watches, sunglasses and backpacks, as well as providing power in remote areas.

Solar thermal technology is large-scale by comparison. One big difference from PV is that solar thermal power plants generate electricity indirectly. Heat from the sun's rays is collected and used to heat a fluid. The steam produced from the heated fluid powers a generator that produces electricity. It's similar to the way fossil fuel-burning power plants work except the steam is produced by the collected heat rather than from the combustion of fossil fuels.

This is Mechanical Engineering

      Mohr's Circle

Introduced by Otto Mohr in 1882, Mohr's Circle illustrates principal stresses and stress transformations via a graphical format,

                

The two principal stresses are shown in red, and the maximum shear stress is shown in orange. Recall that the normal stresses equal the principal stresses when the stress element is aligned with the principal directions, and the shear stress equals the maximum shear stress when the stress element is rotated 45° away from the principal directions.

As the stress element is rotated away from the principal (or maximum shear) directions, the normal and shear stress components will always lie on Mohr's Circle.

Mohr's Circle was the leading tool used to visualize relationships between normal and shear stresses, and to estimate the maximum stresses, before hand-held calculators became popular. Even today, Mohr's Circle is still widely used by engineers all over the world.

    Derivation of Mohr's Circle:

To establish Mohr's Circle, we first recall the stress transformation formulas for plane stress at a given location,

             

Using a basic trigonometric relation (cos²2q + sin²2q = 1) to combine the two above equations we have,

               

This is the equation of a circle, plotted on a graph where the abscissa is the normal stress and the ordinate is the shear stress. This is easier to see if we interpret s_x and s_y as being the two principal stresses, and t_xy as being the maximum shear stress. Then we can define the average stress, s_avg, and a "radius" R (which is just equal to the maximum shear stress),

                                    

 

The circle equation above now takes on a more familiar form,

                 

The circle is centered at the average stress value, and has a radius R equal to the maximum shear stress, as shown in the figure below,