Report On Wind Mill

A windmill is a machine which converts the energy of wind into rotational energy
by means of vanes called sails or blades. Originally windmills were developed
for milling grain for food production. In the course of history the windmill was
adapted to many other industrial uses. An important application was to pump
water. Windmills used for generating electricity are commonly known as wind
turbines.

Windmills in antiquity
The windwheel of the Greek engineer Heron of Alexandria in the 1st century AD
is the earliest known instance of using a wind-driven wheel to power a
machine. Another early example of a wind-driven wheel was the prayer wheel,
which was used in ancient Tibet and China since the 4th century. It has been
claimed that the Babylonian emperor Hammurabi planned to use wind power for
his ambitious irrigation project in the 17th century BC.
Vertical windmills
There is an ongoing debate among historians on whether and how the windmill
from the middle East influenced the development of the early European
windmill. In northwestern Europe, the horizontal-axis or vertical windmill (so
called due to the plane of the movement of its sails) is believed to date from the
last quarter of the 12th century in the triangle of northern France, eastern England
and Flanders. The earliest certain reference to a windmill in Europe (assumed to
have been of the vertical type) dates from 1185, in Weedley, Yorkshire, although a
number of earlier but less certainly dated twelfth century European sources
referring to windmills have also been found. These earliest mills were used to
grind cereals.
Post mill
The evidence at present is that the earliest type of European windmill was the post
mill, so named because of the large upright post on which the mill's main structure
(the "body" or "buck") is balanced. By mounting the body this way,
the mill is able to rotate to face the wind direction; an essential requirement for
windmills to operate economically in North-Western Europe, where wind
directions are variable. The body contains all the milling machinery. The first post
mills were of the sunken type where the post was buried in an earth mound to
support it. Later a wooden support was developed called the trestle. This was often
covered over or surrounded by a roundhouse to protected the trestle from the
weather and to provide storage space. This type of windmill was the most common
in Europe until the 19th century when more powerful tower and smock mills
replaced them.
Hollow-post mill
In a hollow-post mill the post on which the body is mounted is hollowed out, to
accommodate the drive shaft. In this way it is possible to drive machinery below or
outside the body while still being able to rotate the body into the wind. Hollow-
post mills driving scoop wheels were used in the Netherlands to drain wetlands
from the 14th century onwards.
Tower mill
By the end of the thirteenth century the masonry tower mill, on which only the cap
is rotated rather than the whole body of the mill, had been introduced. The spread
of tower mills came with a growing economy that called for larger and more stable
sources of power though they were more expensive to build. In contrast to the post
mill, only the cap of the tower mill needs to be turned into the wind, so the main
structure can be made much taller, allowing the sails to be made longer, which
enables them to provide useful work even in low winds. The cap can be turned into
the wind either by winches or gearing inside the cap or from a winch on the tail
pole outside the mill. A method of keeping the cap and sails into the wind
automatically is by using a fantail, a small windmill mounted at right angles to the
sails, at the rear of the windmill. These are also fitted to tail poles of post mills and
are common in Great Britain and English-speaking countries of the former British
Empire, Denmark and Germany but rare in other places. Tower mills with a fixed
cap are found around the Mediterranean Sea. They are built with the sails facing
the prevailing wind direction.
 Report on solar panel

A solar panel (photovoltaic module or photovoltaic panel) is a packaged,

interconnected assembly of solar cells, also known as photovoltaic cells. The solar
panel can be used as a component of a larger photovoltaic system to generate and
supply electricity in commercial and residential applications.
Because a single solar panel can produce only a limited amount of power, many
installations contain several panels. A photovoltaic system typically includes an
array of solar panels, an inverter, and sometimes a battery and interconnection
wiring.

Theory and construction

Solar panels use light energy (photons) from the sun to generate electricity through
the photovoltaic effect. The structural (load carrying) member of a module can
either be the top layer or the back layer. The majority of modules use wafer-
based crystalline silicon cells or thin-film cells based on cadmium
telluride or silicon. The conducting wires that take the current off the panels may
contain silver, copper or other conductive (but generally not magnetic) transition
metals.
The cells must be connected electrically to one another and to the rest of the
system. Cells must also be protected from mechanical damage and moisture. Most
solar panels are rigid, but semi-flexible ones are available, based on thin-film cells.
Electrical connections are made in series to achieve a desired output voltage
and/or in parallel to provide a desired current capability.
Separate diodes may be needed to avoid reverse currents, in case of partial or total
shading, and at night. The p-n junctions of mono-crystalline silicon cells may have
adequate reverse current characteristics that these are not necessary. Reverse
currents waste power and can also lead to overheating of shaded cells.
Solar cells become less efficient at higher temperatures and installers try to provide
good ventilation behind solar panels.
Some recent solar panel designs include concentrators in which light is focused
by lenses or mirrors onto an array of smaller cells. This enables the use of cells
with a high cost per unit area (such as gallium arsenide) in a cost-effective way.
Depending on construction, photovoltaic panels can produce electricity from a
range of frequencies of light, but usually cannot cover the entire solar range
(specifically, ultraviolet, infrared and low or diffused light). Hence much of the
incident sunlight energy is wasted by solar panels, and they can give far higher
efficiencies if illuminated with monochromatic light. Therefore another design
concept is to split the light into different wavelength ranges and direct the beams
onto different cells tuned to those ranges. This has been projected to be capable of
raising efficiency by 50%. The use of infrared photovoltaic cells has also been
proposed to increase efficiencies, and perhaps produce power at night.

Rigid thin-film modules

In rigid thin film modules, the cell and the module are manufactured in the same
production line.
The cell is created on a glass substrate or superstrate, and the electrical connections
are created in situ, a so called "monolithic integration". The substrate or superstrate
is laminated with an encapsulant to a front or back sheet, usually another sheet of
glass.