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Aug 17th, 2006 - 06:06:11 |
Novell Zwangendaba
REPORT ON STUDIO SET UP AND ACTIVITIES
AFRIK SOLAR STUDIO’s ambitious research agenda continues to explore a wide variety of topics in software, hardware, integration, interactivity, and live recording issues. And to achieve the project’s success, I have undertaken to lay out the studio set up;
FACILITIES
The studio will consist of a recording booths for both vocals and instruments, control rooms, a separate tape music studio, a service room and an office. The rooms will be connected by audio and Ethernet cabling with access to the Internet.
The equipment will consist of 2-track analog tape recorders, analog and digital synthesizers, samplers and computer workstations. The backbone of the computer facilities is a network of workstations equipped with analog/digital-converters and MIDI. The basic system will have a total of 3.5Gb disk space, a DAT drive and a sufficient amount of RAM. In addition, there will be latest PCs/Benq//Mac-compatible computers, a Macintosh SE and an Apple IIe.
Software running on the studio will include Cubase, Cakewalk, Hammerhead, Reason,Csound, Music Kit, SoundWorks and various other musical programs.
Although Open Sound Control was developed to control a sound processing application from another machine across a network, many benefits have been found of using OSC within a sound processing application to improve abstraction and manage complexity .
The equipment to be used at the studio will evolve from traditional analog tape recorders and synthesizers to modern computer workstations and MIDI instruments.
The studio will also shift and have a major focus towards education, software development and music research.
Education and other activities
The studio will provide teaching for music students. Programs consisting of courses, seminars and literature in the special fields of studio work, that requires participation in general musicological and ethnomusicological will be offered. Computer science is recommendable as a secondary modern recording subject.
Hands-on courses on acoustics, studio techniques, musical applications of computers and computer-assisted music productions will be offered. The programs will provide thorough basic education in electronic and computer music and music technology.
The studio will also provide tutoring for researchers. Teaching will also be available to the general public via courses held regularly at the studio.
The studio will also arrange electronic music concerts featuring works both by up-coming and established artists
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Summary
The studio will provide artists, researchers and students with good technical facilities including modern computer equipment and networking capabilities. Moreover it will provide equipment for experimental composition activities. And will be open to interdisciplinary and cross-artistic projects .
Aug 17th, 2006 - 05:39:00 |
Novell Zwangendaba
REPORT ON SOLAR ENERGY RESEARCH
This report is based on a Basic Energy Sciences research that was undertaken in 2005, to examine the challenges and opportunities for the development of solar-powered studio, to make maximum use of solar energy as a competitive energy source and to identify the technical barriers to commercial-scale implementation of solar energy and the basic research directions showing promise to overcome them.
International demand for energy is projected to have a significant increase, doubling manifold by 2050 and to more than triple by the end of the century. Incremental improvements in existing energy networks will not be adequate to supply this demand sustainably. Finding sufficient supplies of clean energy for the future is one of society’s most daunting challenges.
Sunlight provides by far the largest of all carbon-neutral energy sources. More energy from sunlight strikes the Earth in one hour (4.3 × 1020 J) than all the energy consumed on the planet in a year (4.1 × 1020 J). We currently exploit this solar resource through solar electricity — a $7.5 billion industry growing at a rate of 35–40% per annum — and solar-derived fuel from biomass, which provides the primary energy source for over a billion people.
Yet, in 2001, solar electricity provided less than 0.1% of the world's electricity, and solar fuel from modern (sustainable) biomass provided less than 1.5% of the world's energy. The huge gap between our present use of solar energy and its enormous undeveloped potential defines a grand challenge in energy research. Sunlight is a compelling solution to our need for clean, abundant sources of energy in the future. It is readily available, secure from geopolitical tension, and poses no threat to our environment through pollution or to our climate through greenhouse gases.
This report identifies the key scientific challenges and research directions that will enable efficient and economic use of the solar resource to provide a significant fraction of global primary energy by the mid 21st century.
Solar energy conversion systems fall into three categories according to their primary energy product: solar electricity, solar fuels, and solar thermal systems. Each of the three generic approaches to exploiting the solar resource has untapped capability well beyond its present usage.
SOLAR ELECTRICITY
The challenge in converting sunlight to electricity via photovoltaic solar cells is dramatically reducing the cost/watt of delivered solar electricity — by approximately a factor of 5–10 to compete with fossil and nuclear electricity and by a factor of 25–50 to compete with primary fossil energy. New materials to efficiently absorb sunlight, new techniques to harness the full spectrum of wavelengths in solar radiation, and new approaches based on nanostructured architectures can revolutionize the technology used to produce solar electricity. The technological development and successful commercialization of single-crystal solar cells demonstrates the promise and practicality of photovoltaics, while novel approaches exploiting thin films, organic semiconductors, dye sensitization, and quantum dots offer fascinating new opportunities for cheaper, more efficient, longer-lasting systems. Many of the new approaches are enabled by (1) remarkable recent advances in the fabrication of nanoscale architectures by novel top-down and bottom-up techniques; (2) advances in nanoscale characterization using electron, neutron, and x-ray scattering and spectroscopy; and (3) sophisticated computer simulations of electronic and molecular behavior in nanoscale semiconductor assemblies using density functional theory. Such advances in the basic science of solar electric conversion, coupled to the new semiconductor materials now available, could drive a revolution in the way that solar cells are conceived, designed, implemented, and manufactured.
SOLAR FUELS
The inherent day-night and sunny-cloudy cycles of solar radiation necessitate an effective method to store the converted solar energy for later dispatch and distribution. The most attractive and economical method of storage is conversion to chemical fuels. The challenge in solar fuel technology is to produce chemical fuels directly from sunlight in a robust, cost-efficient fashion.
For millennia, cheap solar fuel production from biomass has been the primary energy source on the planet. For the last two centuries, however, energy demand has outpaced biomass supply. The use of existing types of plants requires large land areas to meet a significant portion of primary energy demand. Almost all of the arable land on Earth would need to be covered with the fastest-growing known energy crops, such as switchgrass, to produce the amount of energy currently consumed from fossil fuels annually. Hence, the key research goals are (1) application of the revolutionary advances in biology and biotechnology to the design of plants and organisms that are more efficient energy conversion “machines,” and (2) design of highly efficient, all-artificial, molecular-level energy conversion machines exploiting the principles of natural photosynthesis. A key element in both approaches is the continued elucidation — by means of structural biology, genome sequencing, and proteomics — of the structure and dynamics involved in the biological conversion of solar radiation to sugars and carbohydrates. The revelation of these long-held secrets of natural solar conversion by means of cutting-edge experiment and theory will enable a host of exciting new approaches to direct solar fuel production. Artificial nanoscale assemblies of new organic and inorganic materials and morphologies, replacing natural plants or algae, can now use sunlight to directly produce H2 by splitting water and hydrocarbons via reduction of atmospheric CO2. While these laboratory successes demonstrate the appealing promise of direct solar fuel production by artificial molecular machines, there is an enormous gap between the present state of the art and a deployable technology. The current laboratory systems are unstable over long time periods, too expensive, and too inefficient for practical implementation. Basic research is needed to develop approaches and systems to bridge the gap between the scientific frontier and practical technology.
SOLAR THERMAL SYSTEMS
The key challenge in solar thermal technology is to identify cost-effective methods to convert sunlight into storable, dispatchable thermal energy. Reactors heated by focused, concentrated sunlight in thermal towers reach temperatures exceeding 3,000°C, enabling the efficient chemical production of fuels from raw materials without expensive catalysts. New materials that withstand the high temperatures of solar thermal reactors are needed to drive applications of this technology. New chemical conversion sequences, like those that split water to produce H2 using the heat from nuclear fission reactors, could be used to convert focused solar thermal energy into chemical fuel with unprecedented efficiency and cost effectiveness. At lower solar concentration temperatures, solar heat can be used to drive turbines that produce electricity mechanically with greater efficiency than the current generation of solar photovoltaics. When combined with solar-driven chemical storage/release cycles, such as those based on the dissociation and synthesis of ammonia, solar engines can produce electricity continuously 24 h/day. Novel thermal storage materials with an embedded phase transition offer the potential of high thermal storage capacity and long release times, bridging the diurnal cycle. Nanostructured thermoelectric materials, in the form of nanowires or quantum dot arrays, offer a promise of direct electricity production from temperature differentials with efficiencies of 20–30% over a temperature differential of a few hundred degrees Celsius. The much larger differentials in solar thermal reactors make even higher efficiencies possible. New low-cost, high-performance reflective materials for the focusing systems are needed to optimize the cost effectiveness of all concentrated solar thermal technologies.
PRIORITY RESEARCH DIRECTIONS
Over thirteen priority research directions (PRDs) with high potential for producing scientific breakthroughs that could dramatically advance solar energy conversion to electricity, fuels, and thermal end uses have been identified. Many of these PRDs address issues of concern to more than one approach or technology. These cross-cutting issues include (1) coaxing cheap materials to perform as well as expensive materials in terms of their electrical, optical, chemical, and physical properties; (2) developing new paradigms for solar cell design that surpass traditional efficiency limits; (3) finding catalysts that enable inexpensive, efficient conversion of solar energy into chemical fuels; (4) identifying novel methods for self-assembly of molecular components into functionally integrated systems; and (5) developing materials for solar energy conversion infrastructure, such as transparent conductors and robust, inexpensive thermal management materials.
Although large barriers prevent present technology from producing a significant fraction of our primary energy from sunlight by the mid-21st century, scientists have identified promising routes for basic research that can bring this goal within reach. Much of this optimism is based on the continuing, rapid worldwide progress in nanoscience. Powerful new methods of nanoscale fabrication, characterization, and simulation — using tools that were not available as little as five years ago — create new opportunities for understanding and manipulating the molecular and electronic pathways of solar energy conversion. Additional optimism arises from impressive strides in genetic sequencing, protein production, and structural biology that will soon bring the secrets of photosynthesis and natural bio-catalysis into sharp focus. Understanding these highly effective natural processes in detail will allow us to modify and extend them to molecular reactions that directly produce sunlight-derived fuels that fit seamlessly into our existing energy networks. The rapid advances on the scientific frontiers of nanoscience and molecular biology provide a strong foundation for future breakthroughs in solar energy conversion.
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