Efficient Solar Concentrators: Affordable Energy from Water and Sunlight
Broad Funding Opportunity Announcement Project: Teledyne is developing a liquid prism panel that tracks the position of the sun to help efficiently concentrate its light onto a solar cell to produce power. Typically, solar tracking devices have bulky and expensive mechanical moving parts that require a lot of power and are often unreliable. Teledyne’s liquid prism panel has no bulky and heavy supporting parts—instead it relies on electrowetting. Electrowetting is a process where an electric field is applied to the liquid to control the angle at which it meets the sunlight above and to control the angle of the sunlight to the focusing lensthe more direct the angle to the focusing lens, the more efficiently the light can be concentrated to solar panels and converted into electricity. This allows the prism to be tuned like a radio to track the sun across the sky and steer sunlight into the solar cell without any moving mechanical parts. This process uses very little power and requires no expensive supporting hardware or moving parts, enabling efficient and quiet rooftop operation for integration into buildings.
- Research Organization:
- Teledyne Scientific & Imaging
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E)
- OSTI ID:
- 1046645
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
Energy from Water and Sunlight: Affordable Energy from Water and Sunlight
Enhancement of Optical Efficiency of CSP Mirrors for Reducing O&M Cost via Near-Continuous Operation of Self-Cleaning Electrodynamic Screens (EDS). Final Report