Solar Power Technologies: Past, Present and Future

Presented by Artin Der Minassians

Renewable energies and, especially, solar power technologies have been of particular interest to governments, academia, and industry recently. In this seminar, a brief overview of various solar power technologies will be presented and challenges for embracing renewable energy will be discussed. Possible strategies and ideas to overcome the challenges will be presented to show available contribution opportunities as deployment of renewable technologies goes through its course of exponential growth. A distributed solar-thermal-electric power generation technology will be discussed that combines residential solar-thermal technology with a moderate-temperature Stirling engine to generate electricity. In addition to residential electricity cogeneration, a moderate-temperature Stirling engine has great potentials in other arena such as geothermal, biomass, and waste heat recovery applications as well as a grid-connected thermal storage system.

 

Speaker:

 

Artin Der Minassians received his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley. His doctoral dissertation – Stirling Engines for Low-Temperature Solar-Thermal-Electric Power Generation – has attracted significant interest in academia through his publications as well as in industry through the Technology Breakthrough Competition at UC Berkeley. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Amirkabir University of Technology (a.k.a. Tehran Polytechnic) in Iran. His Master’s dissertation on Harmonic Analysis of Power Systems was selected as the best dissertation of the year and was recognized as such at Khwarizmi Festival, the most prestigious academic award for young investigators in Iran. Der Minassians has held several positions in industry and research institutions throughout his career. He currently serves as Staff Engineer with Advanced R&D department at Volterra Semiconductor, where he designs and develops cutting edge integrated power electronic systems as new product vectors for emerging markets.

 

  Date:                September 20, 2012

  Time:               16:15

  Place:               Room 308 E-PAB, AUA

 

The seminar is open to the public