Moving from Li to Na ion intercalation battery: electronic charge transfer mechanism in cathodes studied with ab-initio methods

Sodium intercalation batteries might prove to be a viable alternative of lithium ion batteries, which is both expensive and in short supply due to unavailability of lithium .Renewable energy sources being crucial to India's energy future, there is a huge need to develop scalable and cost effective storage technology with earth abundant materials to provide load balancing. Moving from lithium to sodium ion intercalation materials, electrochemical properties change significantly and electrochemical potential of intercalation drops.

Redesigning the National Solar Mission for Rural India

The success of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission depends on certain critical features – the subsidy structure, the role of standardised systems and institutional models of delivery As the actual costs of small systems are considerably higher, on a per watt basis, than the benchmark costs assumed for the subsidy, smaller systems that are within the reach of the rural poor receive lower subsidies than larger systems.

Scoping technology options for India’s oil security: Part II – Coal to liquids and bio-diesel

India's diesel consumption is several times that of petrol In this article, we examine two options for meeting India's diesel demand: coal to liquids and bio-diesel Coal gasification, followed by Fischer-Tropsch (FT) synthesis offers an opportunity for large-scale production of diesel as proven by South Africa, and now being attempted by China and Qatar. India could consider this option given its large coal reserves.

Analytical derivation of explicit J–V model of a solar cell from physics based implicit model

Recently a simple explicit model was introduced to represent the J–V characteristics of an illuminated solar cell with parasitic resistances and bias dependent photocurrent as vm + jn = 1. Here the normalized voltage, v and normalized current density j can be represented as v = V/Voc and j = J/Jsc respectively, where Voc is the open circuit voltage and Jsc is the short circuit current density. This model is useful for design, characterization and simple fill factor calculation and its applicability was demonstrated with the measured data of a wide variety of solar cells.

A Statistical Model for Wind Power on the Basis of Ramp Analysis

Due to stochastic nature of wind distribution, wind power output comes with unscheduled changes called ramp events. In this paper, a semi-analytical approach is considered to analyze the distribution of ramp events. A simple empirical equation is derived based on the probability of wind ramp events considering the stochastic nature of wind power distribution for the Indian state of Karnataka.

Determination of favorable inter-particle interactions for formation of substitutionally ordered solid phases from a binary mixture of oppositely charged colloidal suspensions

This paper introduces the concept of using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) techniques for predicting electrochemical potential of cathode materials in combination with first-principles based quantum mechanical calculations. The proposed method can be used to predict the Lithium ion battery voltage if a new material is chosen as cathode. The methodology has low time-space complexity of computation and aims to integrate ANN with quantum mechanics based Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations for accelerated insertion of new materials into engineering systems.