Solar Thermal Energy Utilization

This book aims to provide a clear vision to scientists, industrialists and policy makers on renewable energy resources, predicted challenges and emerging applications. It can be used to help produce new technologies for sustainable, connected and harvested energy.

This book covers challenges and opportunities related to solar-energy based systems. It covers a wide variety of topics related to solar energy, including applications-based systems such as solar thermal systems that are focused on drying, desalination, space cooling, refrigeration, and processing; recent advances in solar cells (DSSC) and photovoltaics; technologies for storage of energy (both sensible heating as well as latent heating); and the design of concentrated solar receivers. The information is presented in the context of the overall global energy utilization, and the role of solar energy has been highlighted. The contents of this book will be of interest to researchers, professionals, and policymakers alike.

This book shows the different molecular devices used for solar energy conversion and storage and the important characterization techniques for this kind of device. It has five chapters describing representative molecule-based solar cells, such as organic solar cells, dye-sensitized solar cells and hybrid solar cells (perovskite solar cell and quantum dots solar cells).