The PV inverter lifetime is affected by mission profiles, which include the solar irradiance and ambient temperature of the installation site. In previous research, the design for reliability approach has been used to evaluate the reliability of the PV inverter, where the solar irradiances have been measured on a fixed tilt and orientation angle. In most cases, the tilt is chosen to be the latitude angle and the orientation is facing south for maximum energy production throughout the year. However, the impact of the tilt and orientation of the PV array on the inverter lifetime has not been considered so far. The tradeoff between the PV energy yield and the inverter lifetime can be analysed for different PV array positioning. This paper thus evaluates the lifetime of the PV inverter with varying the tilt and orientation angle of PV panels, where the PV panel degradation rate is also taken into account. The evaluation is based on the mission profiles of Algiers, Algeria. The results reveal that orientation has a strong impact on the PV inverter loading and certain orientations result in high PV energy production and long lifetime of the PV inverter. It is also shown that the PV panel aging in Algeria has a significant impact on the lifetime estimation of the PV inverter for different orientations.

An efficient analytical model for the transfer impedance and admittance of a noncoaxial/twinax braided–shielded cable with apertures on its sheath is proposed by generalizing the old Vance's and Kley's formulas, and it is derived using the complex analyses with an appropriate conformal mapping. Therefore, such a noncoaxial cable is converted into a coaxial one which can be studied using the traditional multiconductor transmission line method. It is shown that the aperture inductance is related to the position of the inner conductor and the radial position of each aperture on its sheath. In addition, the modal domain analysis is performed to obtain the common-mode (CM) and differential-mode (DM) transfer impedance/admittance of the twinax braided–shielded cable, with CM and DM currents inside the inner conductors examined. The proposed model is validated by comparing the results with that obtained by the method of moments (MoM)-based commercial software FEKO. It is found that the uniform distribution of the apertures on the sheath reduces the induced DM current significantly

An efficient mathematical method is developed to design time modulated linear array (TMLA) with desired side lobs and sidebands levels with maximum achievable directivity. The array factor of the TMLA is represented in terms of a finite series of Chebyshev polynomials of the first and the third kinds for the case of odd and even number of elements in the TMLA, respectively. Furthermore, it is shown that the positions of side lobes can be obtained by only finding the roots of a polynomial generated by Chebyshev polynomials of the second or the fourth kinds, respectively. In addition, by obtaining the accurate positions of all the side lobes in terms of the switch-ON durations of the TMLA array, it is possible to determine, accurately, the optimum regions of the switch-ON durations that satisfy the desired specifications in the design. Finally, numeric simulations and comparison with differential evolution method are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed mathematical method.

A generalized multiconductor transmission line (MTL) model is integrated with the polynomial chaos stochastic Galerkin method (PC-SGM) in order to predict the stochastic response of a nonuniform multitwisted bundle of twisted-wire pairs (MTB-TWP) with random parameters, which is excited by random plane waves. The twist pitches of such nonuniform MTB-TWP are considered to be spatial stochastic functions, where its parametric equations are derived in their general form. Moreover, by taking the geometry deformation of the MTB-TWP cable into account, some of its parameters are represented by random variables, and the incident plane-wave fields can also be changed in some random ways. After that, the PC-SGM is applied to the stochastic telegrapher's equations in order to obtain deterministic ones that can be solved by using the MTL model. Therefore, the effects of the uncertainties of the parameters on the common mode and the differential mode currents are investigated in details, where, in each case, the probability density function is given. The results are validated in comparison with Monte Carlo (MC) method, where a very good agreement is obtained. It is shown that the PC-SGM simulation time is much smaller than that of the MC method as the number of random variables is relatively small.

An efficient electronic beam steering technique in time modulated linear array (TMLA) is proposed, where the first positive and negative sidebands are utilised to implement the electronic steering process. In this technique, new periodic time sequences are used, in which a positive‐ON, negative‐ON, and OFF durations are utilised to obtain high sufficient steering in TMLA. Furthermore, it is shown that by using these time sequences, the non‐steerable array pattern at the fundamental frequency and also the even sidebands can be eliminated and nulled to zero. In addition, the radiation power and the directivity of this proposed steered‐TMLA are formulated in their closed form. The genetic algorithm is implemented to optimise the steered‐TMLA by suppressing the remaining odd sidebands and increasing the power radiation at the first positive and negative sidebands.

The encapsulant browning degradation mode of photovoltaic (PV) modules is affected by ultraviolet irradiance, ambient temperature, and humidity of the installation site. In this article, the degradation rate for encapsulant browning, measured by short-circuit current degradation, is estimated for different PV module tilt and orientation angles in the Algiers region, characterized by a temperate climate. The activation energy for encapsulant browning is calculated using the acceleration factor modeling of the field-to-field degradation and physical models, in conjunction with the meteorological data of two locations in Algeria, where the same module type is fielded for 9–10 years. The tradeoff between the PV energy production and the PV module lifetime is carried out for different PV module positioning, assuming that encapsulant browning is the main failure mechanism experienced in the field. The results reveal that the orientation angle affects the PV module lifetime, where orienting the PV module from east to west increases the lifetime up to 30%, and the lifetime energy production up to 6%, due to reduced degradation. It is also presumed that although the Saharan region of Adrar receives more UV light and ambient temperatures throughout the year in Algeria, the PV modules fielded in the Mediterranean region of Algiers suffer higher degradation, which isexplained by the high humidity experienced in Algiers that accelerates the encapsulant browning failure mechanism.