A professor created a prototype photovoltaic cell that could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter even at night.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himSolar panels that work even at night. Although it sounds like a fantasy, an American professor has created a prototype photovoltaic cell that could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter even at night.
He is Jeremy Munday, a lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, who has developed a system based on the properties of the physical bodies of radiate heat into the surrounding environment, if they are colder.
Munday says the process is similar to the way a normal solar cell works, but in reverse. An object that is hot compared to its surroundings will radiate heat as infrared light (a conventional solar cell is cold compared to the sun, so it absorbs light). Space is very cold, so if you have a hot object and point it towards the sky, it will radiate heat towards it (a phenomenon that has been used for night cooling for hundreds of years).
As Jeremy Munday explains, the process behind the concept is similar to the way a normal photovoltaic unit works, but in reverse: the nocturnal solar cells would be composed of photovoltaics. thermoradiative (a hybrid device that couples a thermoradiative cell to a traditional PV cell) and a system that exploits the radiative cooling.
The latter is a natural phenomenon whereby heat is radiated into space from the surface of the Earth or from a hot object during the night.
“A normal solar cell generates energy by absorbing sunlight, causing a voltage to appear on the device and current to flow. In these new devices, however, light is emitted and the current and voltage go in the opposite direction, but energy is still generated - says Munday. You have to use different materials, but the physics are the same ”.
Munday and his team are working on the first physical prototypes convinced that nighttime solar cells, if specially designed, they could boast up to 50W of power per square meter under ideal conditions, about a quarter of what conventional photovoltaic technology can generate during the day. In addition, with appropriate modifications, they could also work during daylight hours, creating a system potentially active 24 hours a day, correctly balancing the electricity grid during the day-night cycle.
Lo studio “Nighttime Photovoltaic Cells: Electrical Power Generation by Optically Coupling with Deep Space” è pubblicato qui.
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