Descrizione del progetto
Un nuovo modo di sfruttare la potenza del sole
La tendenza del mondo verso l’energia pulita ha portato a una domanda costante e crescente di impianti fotovoltaici più efficienti e affidabili. Il progetto ConPhoNo, finanziato dall’UE, propone una nuova invenzione costituita da una sottile lamina di plastica in grado di raccogliere la luce solare e indirizzarla verso un punto di intensa emissione di luce. Il progetto esaminerà le domande aperte relative all’applicazione dell’invenzione allo scopo di preparare il prodotto per il mercato. Inoltre, queste lamine di concentrazione saranno collaudate nel fotovoltaico a concentrazione, che è considerato il principio guida nell’energia solare. L’obiettivo del progetto è dimostrare che tali lamine possono sostituire con successo i concentratori a lenti di Fresnel esistenti, aumentando l’efficienza del fotovoltaico a concentrazione e riducendo al contempo i costi di produzione.
Obiettivo
I invented a thin plastic foil capable of collecting sunlight from a certain incident angle and guiding it to a spot of intense light emission, thereby concentrating the light by a factor of 300 and more.
In the first step, ConPhoNo will evaluate the application of the foils for safety features. Here, the foils will be laminated to a product showing bright colorful pictures when properly aligned to the sun. This application exhibits a high chance of success as the technical feasibility has already been proven, and the relevant market is well-known by the ConPhoNo partner. It is therefore the goal to put these safety features on the market.
In parallel, the application of the concentrator foils will be tested in concentrated photovoltaics (CPV), which is the most efficient of all solar energy concepts (world record of 46%). In that case, solar cells will be placed at the spots of intense light emission. Differently from safety features, where a customer is actively checking a product for authenticity by holding it at the right angle into the sun, this is more complex in CPV.
In step two, the concentrators will be used with mechanical sun-tracking like state-of-the-art CPV. Here, the concentrator foils will replace the Fresnel lens based concentrators used today. I am confident that these concentrators are superior as they are a hundred times thinner, much easier to produce, and they enable bandgap matching, which may double the efficiency of CPV, reaching a theoretical limit of about 86%.
The ability to produce very thin concentrators will also increase the motivation of the CPV industry to scale down the bulkiness of the sun-tracking system.
In the third step, it will be evaluated if thin beam steering devices based on electro-wetting may become industrially available and if they can be combined with the new concentrators. The resulting thin CPV modules would drastically reduce the cost of CPV and literally boost worldwide solar energy production.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-POC-LS - ERC Proof of Concept Lump Sum PilotIstituzione ospitante
42119 Wuppertal
Germania