Solar Walkways In Residential Townships

Vision: To make residential townships in the urban areas self-sustainable.

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Hypothesis: If the Structurally Engineered solar panels are placed instead of paver blocks for walkways in residential townships then it will help to partially replace the use of conventional energy to renewable energy.

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Me and my friends Mayur Rathod, Abhishek Phatak, and Amol Paidlewar presented a research paper on the same topic a year ago at a conference and won the first price for it, so I thought of sharing it with my readers.

The energy requirements of township projects are huge. They require energy for lighting street lamps, parking lights, water distribution pumps, etc. To fulfill these requirements of energy, instead of relying on conventional energy sources like petroleum, gas, and coal, it is better to develop renewable energy sources within the township itself. This will also help in reducing pollution due to fossil fuels for the generation of energy. Solar walkways are a recent advanced technology that has been developing in the industry. It is a series of Structurally-Engineered solar panels that can be driven upon. Instead of walkways made out of Paver Blocks and Concrete, they can be made with solar panels, photovoltaic effect, LEDs, and microprocessor chips with circuitry boards covered with high-strength glass material on the top. Solar Photovoltaic converts sunlight to electricity directly. So, in India, where sunlight is present in most of the daytime, this methodology of using solar panels in walkways will make the townships self-sustainable for energy use. It has many advantages like a clean energy source, more life span of roads (30-40 years), and renewable. Few challenges have to be overcome for replacing the conventional walkways with this technology like high initial cost, high maintenance cost, traction, the load-carrying capacity of tempered glass, drainage, etc. In the future, this technology can be used on a wider scale that will help create an intelligent and secure infrastructure that pays for itself while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

For the purpose of the research we considered a Township model that was generated using AutoCAD Software as shown below:

The Proposed Solar Walkway is expected to generate renewable energy which will fulfill the electricity needs and make the township self-sustainable. Standard Size of Solar Panels manufactured in India for residential projects is 1.65 x 1 m. We used this Standard Solar Panels for our research.

Though it has a high initial cost, in the long run, the cost to benefit ratio is good which makes the project feasible. PVsyst software can be effectively used for designing the grid and analysis of power generation. In addition to the present technology, in the future, this model and technique will very much be in implementation.

Please share your thoughts and share the blog with your loved ones...and stay safe!!!

I am attaching the detailed research paper's PDF link for reference.

http://www.jetir.org/papers/JETIRAV06002.pdf

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