Periodical

Journal of Energy in Southern Africa Vol 26 No.1

This issue comprises several articles and conference papers. The first article “SAURAN, A new resource for solar radiometric data in Southern Africa” gives a brief background to the SAURAN project and describes the network’s operation, coverage and future expansion. The next article “The inter-relationships between regulation and competition enforcement in the South African liquid fuels industry” assesses the inter-relationships between regulation and competition enforcement. “Investigation of common-mode voltage and ground leakage current of grid-connected transformerless PV inverter topology” presents a simplified model of a grid-connected transformerless PV inverter topology. “New markets for renewable industries: Developing countries – Turkey, its potential and policies” investigates and compares the importance of renewable energy usage, recent incentives, renewable energy polices in Turkey and some developed countries. “Production of biodiesel from chicken wastes by various alcohol-catalyst combinations” looks at an environmentally friendly biorefinery process for producing biodiesel from chicken waste. “Aggregate and regional demand for electricity in Malaysia” analyses the electricity consumption in Malaysia. “Optimization analysis of solar-powered average temperature Stirling heat engine” investigates the performance of the solar powered dish-Stirling engine using the nonlinearized heat loss model of the solar dish collector and the irreversible cycle model of the Stirling engine. “Decomposition analysis of energy-related CO2 emissions in South Africa serves as a preliminary attempt to apply the LMDI method to analyse the contribution of the factors which influence energy-related CO2 emission in South Africa over the period 1993- 2011 to foster a deeper understanding pf the driving forces governing energy-related CO2 emission . “ Assessing possible energy potential in a food and beverage industry: Application of IDA-ANN-DEA approach” focuses on a particular food and beverage industry, as a case study to examine the effectiveness of energy management policies in the industry. In “Are solar tracking technologies feasible for domestic applications in rural tropical Africa?” A review of recent literature on tracking as applied to domestic solar harnessing devices is presented. “Performance optimization of an air source heat pump water heater using mathematical modelling” focused on using the mathematical equation for the Coefficient of Performance (COP) of an ideal Carnot’s heat pump (CHP) water heater to develop basic computation in M-file of MATLAB software in order to model the system based on two reservoir temperatures. “Performance of an autonomous solar powered absorption air conditioning system” a solar powered HVAC system is monitored and report delivered on its performance and cost. “Theoretical investigation of a combined Kalina and vapour-absorption cycle” discusses a program that has been developed to calculate enthalpies at the salient points of a combined power and cooling cycle. “A comparative study of the stochastic models and harmonically coupled stochastic models in the analysis and forecasting of solar radiation data” compares two classes of models in the forecasting arena.