Abstract

The 3500-year-old Qanat, Karez, Aflāj, watershed tunnels and sweet water systems are the initial foundations of almost every ancient city community in Central Asia. They allowed controlled irrigation of fields of saline endorheic arid zone basins to regulate the production of Commonsalt crust for the earliest known civilizations. Without this highly engineered architecture often compared to the Great Wall of China or the Pyramids, these arid deserts would have remained desolate. The technique of forming white precipitated salt crust layers, provided a single economic resource enabling these ancient oasis communities to become the icons of historians and archaeologists. These vast desert areas may easily and cheaply be used again to form a white canopy of salt to provide an almost identical reflective or absorptive irradiation as is the case of the white snowed polar regions. With modern tools this ancient technology can be employed to incrementally move the mean global Albedo both positively or negatively, in the event of either a solar minimum or a solar maximum. By industrially creating a pristine white canopy of salt precipitate it would be possible to reflect more energy and increase or decrease the albedo index. Ancient Sabkha salt technology with the use of the Qanat Karez irrigation system, has in the past produced such a white canopy in vast expanses of existing uninhabitable endorheic basins. Existing natural white salar plateaux such as Bonneville, Kalahari and many others also could be cheaply brought under similar control. The archeology of the ancient Silk Road is a critical contribution to its reincarnation, as the new China Belt Road. Cylindrical bifacial PV panels are now an extremely valid application relevant to the proposed salt canopy systems. Since the efficiency of an almost shadow-less panel with solar tracking is optimal to the crystal white salt albedo, the infrastructure of such a system in the vacant endorheic basins positioned in equatorial latitudes, could not be more relevant, in that performance increases strongly depending on three factors: (i) the latitude, (ii) the local diffuse fraction and (iii) the albedo. We propose the use of stroboscope flat propeller shaped PV panels which revolve at 60 cycles per second to provide optimal reflected light [1-6].

Keywords: Bifacial cylindrical PV tracking modules; Albedo; Climate; Money; Irrigation; Common salt; Silk road qanat Aflāj Karez