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Registered Member #175
Joined: Tue Feb 14 2006, 09:32PM
Location: Sudbury, ON
Posts: 111
... wrote ...
However, it will be a much larger magnification factor... I believe they are planning to use a 10' diameter disk focused on to a 4" square of cells (100x) which should give about .5-1kw a peice. To deal with cooling they will plan to use liquid sodium.
Please, please, please tell me they're also going to use all that heat, too. Conventional turbogenerator, sterling, thermocouple... otherwise, the amount of energy untapped is tragic. Liquid sodium!
Don't photocells get less efficient as they get hotter?
Registered Member #56
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:02AM
Location: Southern Califorina, USA
Posts: 2445
I hope so, considering that the most efficient solar cell is <40% efficiency. Assuming they are using the GaAs cells (but not triple junction cells which cost mucho dinero) they could get about 30% efficiency tops in the sun, which leaves about 60% for the thermal energy, which will probably be down to <20% after you run it through a turbine. Not a whole lot, but it does almost double the energy put out... An advantage to using thermal is that you can store it quite efficiently by heating up a huge mass of something during the day, then using it at night...
Registered Member #27
Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 02:20AM
Location: Hyperborea
Posts: 2058
The cells lose efficiency at about 0.5% for every Kelvin increase in temperature above 25 deg C. The internal resistance goes down and the voltage goes down so in some special cases they can almost cancel each other out.
There is often a need for warm water so there is usually no problem putting the excess heat to use.
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Increasing the output of Solar Cells
