Technocrat

Computer Cooling and Solar Photovoltaics

zogger
Sat May 17 20:31:17 -0700 2008
Science
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IBM has taken a trick they developed for cooling hot chips and applied it to another silicon product, solar cells. By using their "liquid metal cooling interface" technique, they were able to run solar cells behind concentrator lenses at extremely high temperatures.

.."For instance, by moving from a 200 sun system ("one sun" is a measurement equal to the solar power incident at noon on a clear summer day), where about 20 watts per square centimeter of power is concentrated onto the cell, to the IBM Lab results of a 2300 sun system, where approximately 230 watts per square centimeter are concentrated onto the cell system, the IBM system cuts the number of photovoltaic cells and other components by a factor of 10."

ed.z.: Holy Grail time when it comes to solar. Being able to go from expensive cells in large areas to cheap reflectors or Fresnel type lenses and just a few cells without suffering rapid catastrophic failure is a significant game changer. Plus you get all that nifty extra waste heat to fool around with ;)

Computer Cooling and Solar Photovoltaics
JoshH
Sat May 17 23:33:22 -0700 2008
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Suddenly my hopes for solar jump through the roof. That kind of output (70 watts of usable power currently) is really substantial. Hopefully this will see some widespread implementations in a decade or two. That would just be the best job in the world... solar death ray engineer.

 
Computer Cooling and Solar Photovoltaics
RedPill
Sun May 18 01:21:46 -0700 2008
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 The PV cells in a solar concentrator are much more expensive than normal one sun cells. However the economics can be favourable in a design that concentrates at a couple of dozen suns.

A fresnel lensed, self tracking system the Sun Cube  is in production now <http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au/>

 
Computer Cooling and Solar Photovoltaics
John Dalton
Sun May 18 02:35:03 -0700 2008
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There was some buzz around the SunCube some years ago about how it was Australia's energy solution.  Since then it seems to have faded from prominence.  The SunCube website talks about fantastically well everything is going but the Australian press seems to be ignoring it.  Does anyone know how real their chances of success are?

High quality heat

wowbagger
Sun May 18 09:03:18 -0700 2008
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There is also the issue of the heat collected from an array. Your basic flat 1-sun PV array can also be used to harvest heat from the sun, but the heat is very "low quality" - you might get decent warm water out of it, but you are unlikely to get really hot water, and for any other use (driving a Stirling cycle engine or an adsorption chiller), fugetaboutit.

Now, with the IBM system, you are getting very high quality heat from the system. I wonder how much they are tapping that? If they were to do something like run an adsorption chiller with that heat, they could also add a quite a bit of cooling capacity to a building right at the times when it would be the most useful.

 

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