ARMONG, NEW YORK, US. IBM has come up with a way of increasing the amount of thermal energy that can be concentrated onto photovoltaic (PV) cells during the CPV process.
Using a large lens to concentrate the sun's power onto a 1 cm2 cell, IBM reports that it is able to capture a "record 230 watts". The energy is converted into 70 watts of electrical power - five times the electrical power density generated by typical cells that use CPV technology in solar farms.
If successfully transferred from the lab to real life, IBM believes its magnifying glass can significantly reduce the cost of a typical CPV based system as less components would be needed. The company says it can cut the number of PV cells and other components by a factor of ten.
However, when 200 suns generating 20 watts/cm2 is converted to 2300 suns generating 230 watts/cm2, what about the problem of heat? As IBM researchers experienced first hand, the heat generated is enough to melt stainless steel, but by using IBM's experience with cooling computer chips, they managed to cool the solar cells from 1,600° to 85°C. According to IBM, its liquid metal cooling interface is able to transfer heat from the solar cell to a copper cooling plate much more efficiently than anything else available today.
In addition to CPV, IBM is also looking at other areas of PV research; focusing on using current technologies to develop cheaper and more efficient silicon solar cells; developing new solution-processed thin film PV devices; and future generation PV architectures based on nanostructures such as semiconductor quantum dots and nanowires.
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