Instructions

Navigation

The PVCDROM is designed to be read like a book. There are links to the next and previous pages at the top of each page and in the footer bar.

On the left side of the page is a table of contents. Click on the chapter headings to see the contents of a chapter. Click again to collapse the chapter and just show the heading.

Check your understanding

We are in the process of adding questions on each page. Answering these questions will help you check your understanding and help you to remember the content on this page. Responses to these questions are anonymously recorded and patterns will be analyzed by pveducation.org staff. We will be improving the content of the website and these questions based on patterns in the responses.

Plugins

The PVCDROM uses interactivity and animations to explain concepts in photovoltaics. To see all the content requires a javascript enabled brower and plugins for flash, shockwave and Java.

Live Calculation

Spread throughout the document are mini-calculators for the equations in the text. Enter numbers in the blue fields. The results are displayed in the yellow fields and update automatically as the inputs change. Javascript is required for the live animations and is present on nearly all browsers.

Cells that can be inputs or output are colored in light green. An example is on the page Energy of a Photon where entering the wavelength gives the energy and vice versa.

Enter very large or very small numbers using the standard exponential notation. For example, 1 000 000 (10⁶) is entered as 1e6.

Flash Player

Most of the animations are now in Flash. It is available on most computers, including linux, but not on the iPhone. Go to the page Properties of Light where you should see animated photons moving across the screen.

Shockwave

Shcokwave is needed for some of the animations but we are phasing it out. To check if shockwave is installed go to http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/welcome/

If you do not have Shockwave installed, download it for free from the Internet.

Unfortunately Shockwave is not available for Linux.

Java

Most computers already have Java installed. If not, you can get the latest version at www.java.com/getjava/

A simple check for Java is to go to the page , Blackbody Radiation where you should see an interactive graph with a temperature slider.

Appearance

Press F11 on most browsers to make the pages fit the screen. As some of the animations are quite large, set the screen resolution to at least 1024 x 768.

The basic font size is set by the browser preferences. If you wish to change your font size click View-->Text Size.