Margie and Bill Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12588/828
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Browsing Margie and Bill Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design by Department "Earth and Planetary Sciences"
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Item LiDAR-Based Solar Mapping for Distributed Solar Plant Design and Grid Integration in San Antonio, Texas(2016-03-16) Le, Tuan B.; Kholdi, Danial; Xie, Hongjie; Dong, Bing; Vega, Rolando E.This study represents advancements in the state-of-the-art of the solar energy industry by leveraging LiDAR-based building characterization for city-wide, distributed solar photovoltaics, solar maps, highlighting the distribution of solar energy across the city of San Antonio. A methodology is implemented to systematically derive the tilt and azimuth angles of each rooftop and to quantify solar direct, diffuse, and global horizontal irradiance for hundreds of buildings in a LiDAR tile scale, by using already established methodologies that are typically only applied to a single location or building rooftop. The methodology enables the formulation of typical meteorological data, measured or forecasted time series of irradiances over distributed assets. A new concept on the subject of distributed solar plant (DSP) design is also introduced, by using the building rooftop tilt and azimuth angles, to strategically optimize the use and adoption of solar incentives according to the grid age and its vulnerabilities to solar variability in the neighborhoods. The method presented here shows that on an hourly basis DSP design could provide a 5% and 9% of net load capacity support per hour in the afternoon and morning times, respectively. Our results show that standard building rooftop tilt angles in the south Texas region has significant impact on the total amount of the energy over the course of a day, though its impact on the shapes of the daily energy profile is relatively insignificant when compared to the azimuth angle. Building surfaces’ azimuth angle is the most important factor to determine the shape of daily energy profile and its peak location within a day. The methodology developed in this study can be employed to study the potential solar energy in other regions and to match the design of distributed solar plants to the capacity needs on specified distribution grids.Item Sensitivity of Distributed Hydrologic Simulations to Ground and Satellite Based Rainfall Products(2014-05-07) Chintalapudi, Singaiah; Sharif, Hatim O.; Xie, HongjieIn this study, seven precipitation products (rain gauges, NEXRAD MPE, PERSIANN 0.25 degree, PERSIANN CCS-3hr, PERSIANN CCS-1hr, TRMM 3B42V7, and CMORPH) were used to force a physically-based distributed hydrologic model. The model was driven by these products to simulate the hydrologic response of a 1232 km2 watershed in the Guadalupe River basin, Texas. Storm events in 2007 were used to analyze the precipitation products. Comparison with rain gauge observations reveals that there were significant biases in the satellite rainfall products and large variations in the estimated amounts. The radar basin average precipitation compared very well with the rain gauge product while the gauge-adjusted TRMM 3B42V7 precipitation compared best with observed rainfall among all satellite precipitation products. The NEXRAD MPE simulated streamflows matched the observed ones the best yielding the highest Nash-Sutcliffe Efficiency correlation coefficient values for both the July and August 2007 events. Simulations driven by TRMM 3B42V7 matched the observed streamflow better than other satellite products for both events. The PERSIANN coarse resolution product yielded better runoff results than the higher resolution product. The study reveals that satellite rainfall products are viable alternatives when rain gauge or ground radar observations are sparse or non-existent.