User:Sl289

My Name

Hi, everyone, my name is Siyuan Lu. You may pronounce it as s~yuan lu. In Chinese, my name "Siyuan" symbols "think further". I think Lu is ok for everyone to pronounce so you can just call me Lu.

Grand Challenge: Make Solar Energy Economical

In principle, sunlight is a near-ideal energy source since it’s essentially free, ubiquitous, and surprisingly powerful. In practice, however, even vast arrays of the most sophisticated photovoltaic cells, which convert sunlight to electricity, seem incapable of meeting all our energy needs. This is largely because they’re confined to the ground, where the Earth’s rotation and atmosphere eliminate and attenuate sunlight.

During the heyday of the Space Age in the late 60s, researchers conceived of solutions to this problem that relied on placing solar arrays, or “powersats,” in orbit. The powersats would beam the collected power down to Earth as microwaves, which can easily penetrate the atmosphere with scarcely any energy lost. Space-based solar power (SBSP) seemed feasible, except for one thing: Launching the necessary infrastructure into high orbit would be prohibitively expensive, especially when cheaper fossil fuels were readily available.

Today, as with many other alternative energy proposals, interest in SBSP has been rejuvenated by the rising direct and indirect costs of fossil fuels, and several SBSP companies have formed. Earlier this year, Pacific Gas & Electric, a major California utility company, signed an agreement to purchase hundreds of megawatts of power from Solaren, an SBSP company, beginning in 2016. Last month, another SBSP company, PowerSat Corporation, filed two patents for technologies that the company claims can shave billions of dollars off the launch costs for an SBSP system. Seed’s Lee Billings spoke with PowerSat’s CEO, William Maness, about the company’s technology and the revival of SBSP.

Solar off the Ground, Lee Billings, Seed Media Group, latest update 2012, Date Accessed September 15, 2013

My Favorite Demonstration in MATLAB

My favorite part in MATLAB is the calculation of matrix because it can calculate matrix in a second and some special command as well. Such as the "eye" command, it produces amazing result that you cannot imagine! How amazing it is!