The first half megawatt - Page 5

 

Shocking! Do you know why concentrated solar, using lenses to intensify the
light, isn't being used yet? Surely you *could* make these panels 10x more
efficient just by incresing their collection area by 10x for the same
silicon!? Just print a sheet of lenses the same size and at the focus of
each a small 'panel' a tenth the size of the current silicon.

  On 04/07/2011 02:48 PM, Giga2 <Giga2 wrote:

  I have heard of such a technology - a sheet of plastic embedded with
"fly's eye" lenses covering the matrix carrying the PV cells. The idea
is that the smaller PV cells at the focus point can use a more expensive
but more advanced technology.
I don't know what the official brand name is, if any.   The disadvantage
is that the panel needs to be steerable to be effective, and you will
still need the same area as a normal PV panel. As the current conversion
efficiency is around 10-15%, you would need super performance cells of
100% efficiency to justify a 10:1 magnification.

 On 4/7/2011 8:01 AM, Tom P wrote:

I have heard that concentrating the sun like this can cause the cells to
heat up....greatly reducing their efficiency....I do not imagine one or
two sun power increases would cause much heating...

have fun.....sno


have fun sno

--
Correct Scientific Terminology:
Hypothesis - a guess as to why or how something occurs
Theory - a hypothesis that has been checked by enough experiments
  to be generally assumed to be true.
Law - a hypothesis that has been checked by enough experiments
  in enough different ways that it is assumed to be truer then a theory.
Note: nothing is proven in science, things are assumed to be true.

 

Also that would happen when there was a lot of sunlight around, and fairly
direct. Maybe you need just right sombination of lenses to panel for the
average sunlight in your area.

 On 4/7/2011 7:28 AM, sno wrote:

No, actually the most efficient cells operate at 300-400 suns.