OK, take that Fresnel lens that you were using to melt pennies and then focus it on a PV cell that is also made of metal. What might be the expected response? The science in this case is making PV cells that can handle the intense heat.
msprout@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I am not a scientist so please correct me if I am off base, but did it really take them this long to attempt to focus light onto PV cells using a fresnel lens?
My hobby as a 15 year old was buying broken projectors to harvest the fresnel lenses in the lamp on top. They could focus sunlight so powerfully that you could burn shit. I didn’t do that, surprisingly. I was like Marge Simpson, I just thought they were neat.
dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 3 days ago
msprout@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That makes sense. If I understood everyone clearly, it’s not the idea to use a fresnel, it’s the fact that we just haven’t had anything capable of withstanding those temperatures and still allowing for the piezoelectric effect to happen.
frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
IIRC, this sort of thing has been floated before. The issue is that you can’t just focus that much light on the solar cell. It’ll burn out.
don@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Not being any kind of solar energy expert, my initial thought was how the cell’s would hold up under the increased heat, and what technology (if any) they’d be using to monitor/mitigate. The article does briefly mention the cells achieving ~33% @ ~167° F, and does mention (what seems to be tangential) technologies that allow for cells to be nailed down as if they were shingles.
My guess is that it isn’t that they finally using techniques that seem obvious to us, but that they’ve developed supporting tech to mitigate the detrimental effects of using magnification.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 3 days ago
i guess a lot of research projects are just there to give the researchers something to do and money, and i’m sure the idea of using lenses has been floated before.
the thing is that it’s not really as good an ideas as it originally seems. After all, you need heavy solid lenses that you have to install above all solar panels, and the cost of that is not negligible. On top of that, there’s other problems that others have already mentioned.
brendansimms@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Adding to what the others wrote, solar cells become less efficient at power conversion (light -> electricity) as the temp of the solar cell materials (semiconductors) increases. So the issues is how to get more photons to the semiconductor without heating it up.
ramjambamalam@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
Would a UV filtering lens help? Do solar cells generate more power from certain parts of the light spectrum?
FreeBeard@slrpnk.net 2 days ago
With one layer the case is simple. There is a certain light energy at which the conversion of light to current occurs called gap energy. If the light energy is lower than that no conversion can happen and if the light energy is higher the extra energy is converted to heat and only gap energy remains.
Filtering UV would be a loss but a small one.