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A novel photovoltaic device for improvements in solar energy collection

University of British Columbia

Governments around the world are striving to develop clean energy solutions to lessen their impact on the environment while addressing the growing need for energy generation. Solar technology has emerged as a major contender and will undoubtedly play a role in this endeavour. However, solar technology has been hampered by its fundamental challenge of cost versus performance. The proposed work recognizes this challenge and introduces a corner-cube-cell capable of being uniformly arrayed for scalability. It is shown that the corner-cube-cell facilitates low-cost implementations, due to its compatibility with standard silicon solar cells, and enables improved performance. Performance improvements shown in this work exhibit an increase in generated electrical power density of up to 3.80% at noon for an 8.29% increase in generated electrical energy density by the end of the day. This improvement comes about due to the geometry of the corner-cube-cell, which captures internal reflections and can exploit multi-channel maximum power point tracking. The corner-cube-cell also shows substantial improvements in generated electrical energy density during sun-rise and sun-set due to its protrusion out of the two-dimensional (horizontal) plane. These performance improvements result in a 6.10% increase in semi-annual generated electrical energy density over a conventional flat-lying solar cell. The introduced technology has strong prospects for realizing low-cost and high-performance solar power system implementations.

Text

2019-06-26

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/70827

Electrical Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/