Book description
The definitive guide to the science of solar energy
You hold in your hands the first, and only, truly comprehensive guide
to the most abundant and most promising source of alternative
energy-solar power.
In recent years, all major countries in the world have been calling
for an energy revolution. The renewable energy industry will drive a
vigorous expansion of the global economy and create more
"green" jobs. The use of fossil fuels to power our way of
living is moving toward an inevitable end, with sources of coal,
petroleum, and natural gas being fiercely depleted.
Solar energy offers a ubiquitous, inexhaustible, clean, and highly
efficient way of meeting the energy needs of the twenty-first century.
This book is designed to give the reader a solid footing in the
general and basic physics of solar energy, which will be the basis of
research and development in new solar engineering technologies in the
years to come.
As solar technologies like solar cells, solar thermal power
generators, solar water heaters, solar photochemistry applications,
and solar space heating-cooling systems become more and more
prominent, it has become essential that the next generation of energy
experts-both in academia and industry-have a one-stop resource for
learning the basics behind the science, applications, and technologies
afforded by solar energy. This book fills that need by laying the
groundwork for the projected rapid expansion of future solar projects.
C. JULIAN CHEN is an Adjunct Professor and Senior
Research Scientist in the Department of Applied Physics and Applied
Mathematics at Columbia University. His research interests include
scanning tunneling microscopy, mathematical models of the human voice,
and utilization of solar energy. Before going into academia, he spent
fifteen years in IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center, where he
authored Introduction to Scanning Tunneling Microscopy and
invented a widely used algorithm for Chinese language speech
recognition.
