Concentrated Solar Cells To Learn From IBM Chips
Posted by Srikant Rajan | # |
08:03:34 am on May 17, 2008

Researchers at IBM have recently demonstrated that it is possible to increase concentration of sunlight on Photovoltaics (PV) cells without melting them.Such cells are commonly referred to Concentrated Photovoltaics (CPV).These CPV’s have a higher input energy per unit area,thus the amount of electric power generated per PV cell  increases nearly five times. However the challenge in using these CPV’s is to cool them efficiently.The technology employed to cool computer chips may provide a solution to this issue.Supratik Guha, lead scientist of photovoltaic research at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, NJ,explains that the heat released by state of art chips is about 100W/cm2 which is similar to the heat output of CPV’s .Guha, further adds that modifying a material normally used in computer chips and employing it in concentrated PV cells improves heat transfer between PV cells and heat sink.

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