Picture provided by SolarFitUK.com
Project Description
An ongoing engineering challenge is to increase the power output of solar panels, without substantially raising the cost (see theoretical). Therefore, when a group of five engineers were given the opportunity to spend a semester working towards this challenge using a solar panel provided by the NPRE Department, they jumped on it.
The team decided to look into a solar mirror booster as a performance enhancing system. Mirror boosters could be attached at a favorable location with respect to the solar panel to increase the amount of radiation incident on the solar cells. |
Currently, research is being done with solar mirror boosting at different companies and universities worldwide. Along with mirror booster technology, companies around the world are researching other possibilities for increasing solar panel output. These include, multi-junction solar cells, portable solar technology, concentrating photovoltaics, and organic photovoltaics. Additionally, scientists are also researching the effect temperature on solar cell efficiency, in extreme environments such as Antarctica, hoping to find potential applications.
Due to budget restrictions, a mirror booster was the most practical small scale project and is therefore the focus of this teams research. |