MIT Making Super Efficient Origami Solar Panels

ByronScott writes "Could the next solar panels be in the shapes of origami cranes? They could be if MIT power engineering professor Jeffrey Grossman has his say. Standard flat solar panels are only optimized to capture sunlight at one point of the sun's trajectory — otherwise they need automated tracking systems to follow the sun. But Grossman found that folded solar cell systems could produce constant power throughout the day sans tracking and his new designs are up to two and a half times more efficient per comparative length and width than traditional flat arrays."

Comments

Interesting but expensive

[mcgrew]

It's an interesting, nerdy endeavor, but less practical than automated tracking systems; the expensive part of solar is the panels themselves. From TFA: His new designs are up to two and a half times more efficient per comparative length and width than traditional flat arrays.

If solar cells were free, than this would indeed be more efficient, and if there's limited space thay MAY be more practical.

Re:Interesting but expensive

[goombah99]

It's an interesting, nerdy endeavor, but less practical than automated tracking systems; the expensive part of solar is the panels themselves. From TFA: His new designs are up to two and a half times more efficient per comparative length and width than traditional flat arrays.

If solar cells were free, than this would indeed be more efficient, and if there's limited space thay MAY be more practical.

Exactly!
        consider the simplified case of sun's arc not moving with the seasons. then you could put down the panels in a 90 degree zig-zag. this way all light that is reflected is assured to strike a second panel. this would dramatically increase the efficiency and reduce the variation throughout the day. but it would take 1.4 times as much panels to cover the same area as a flat panel. if you go for the 3D full corner cube then it's 1.7 times as much.

If you were to spread this out you would have 40% more area. this would mean that at peak power you'd get 1.4 times as much, but at obtuse incidence angles were the reflection is high you'd take a loss. the trade off point is when the reflective loss is greater than 40% I think.

another problem with a highly faceted desing is going to be in making the nominally circular cells conform to odd shaped facets, and for mass producing these. If you look at conventional panels you see they cut they often circular cells into half-circles then put these down in a row laternating the directions. this allows them to make mass producable long sections that dont have as much dead space when the components are placed side by side. If you have facets of differenting shapes you have to make eachone differently and the chips may have to be cut differently.

The best part of this idea is the continuous power level however.

Re:Interesting but expensive

[goombah99]

Looking at the slides more carefully, I think there's some substantially strange assumptions being made. Notice that he starts from completely random and non-symmetric shapes and these are evolved in genetic algorithms. the results he shows are all highly symmetric. some have 3 C4 rotation axes.

this makes no sense to me. the suns seasonal variation and arcs do not illuminate the ground symmetrically. So it is hard to see why it would evolve to a symmetric structure.

so there have to be some assumptions here the article is not exposing. like enforcement of symmetry.

Re:Interesting but expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

so there have to be some assumptions here the article is not exposing. like enforcement of symmetry.

It took me a long time to find the real article. I think this paragraph addresses your concerns.

Interestingly, all the GA structures show similar patterns in their shapes, even for different heights. They contain no holes running across the bounding volume, which is necessary to intercept most of the incoming sunlight, and (less intuitively) they all have triangles coinciding with the 12 edges of the bounding box volume, so that they would cast the same shadow on the ground as the open-box. We emphasize that these patterns emerge from randomly generated structures, are not artifacts of the simulations, and are a fingerprint of emergent behavior resulting from the GA calculations.20 The primary shape of the GA structure [Fig. 2a] is a box with its five visible faces caved in toward the midpoint. A simplified, symmetric version of this was constructed, as shown in Fig. 2b; this idealized structure, which we refer to as the "funnel," generates only 0.03% less energy in the day than the original GA output, and therefore contains most key ingredients of the complicated GA structures.

Of course, is is pretty darn funny. Turns out after all this genetic algorithm stuff. A very simple structure is close enough to optimal to make other more complex structures pointless.

Folding@home?

[tomhudson]

So, we could use these folding panels to power computers folding@home, and the waste heat can warm our houses as a green solution to heating. Just be ready to spend more of that other green folding stuff ...

Useless approximation

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, this will work wonders for my zero-cost zero-thickness self-intersecting perfectly rigid solar panels. I just hope my spherical vacuum-chickens don't try to nest in it.

RE : MIT Making Super Efficient Origami Solar Pane

[rainmouse]

The Earth is already covered in efficient origami solar panels, its just that regular people call them plants.

But space is often limited, and tracking is a main

[SmallFurryCreature]

But space is often limited, because we don't want to cover the landscape in solar panels. But we can put them in places that are already build-up.

And automated tracking systems need more maintenance then fixed systems, that is why roof top solar panels of various sorts don't tend to track. Better accept the lesser efficiency then risk having to have maintenance done on a roof that without solar panels can go for decades without maintenance.

I just found the shapes puzzling, got to wonder how the sunlight enters that first blue one with the spiral in it. It is an intresting idea, but I wonder if they are usable on a roof, some look like their would be really good at catching the wind (read blowing off).

Folded Solar Cells

[oodaloop]

Folded Solar Cells
Capturing sunlight all day
It's been done before

Two and a half times more efficient

[CODiNE]

but 10x harder to clean.

Tired of hearing about super efficient..

[tekrat]

Solar cells that are right around the corner!

Didn't some 8-yr old kid at a science fair demonstrate cells that were 30% more efficient a few months back? And before that there was some researcher who figured out how to make 'em 30% cheaper, and another guy who figured out how to make 'em with paint.

All these stories (heck, if I had the free time, I'd find the Slashdot stories that point to these new miracle products) keep saying that "real soon now", we'll have paint-on, dirt cheap, 110% efficient solar panels that will make so much electrcity, you won't need a $3000 bloom-box to turn natural gas into electricity for pennies a day.

Why, electricity will be so cheap, we won't even have to meter it!

Sure, real soon now. And yet, every time I try and get a quote on mounting a few panels on my roof, the cost is $25,000 and it will take me 30 years to break-even on the electricty. Where's the efficient, cheap PRODUCT that will directly enable ME to put panels on my roof?

How many more YEARS do we have to wait? Or are all these researchers just making press releases and not actually making solar panels? And why aren't solar panels being made?

If all this tech si so f'ing great, you'd think some company, even a Chinese company, would be rushing to make them, even under patent license because they would corner the market if the panels were cheap and more efficient!

Re:Tired of hearing about super efficient..

[raygundan]

"Sure, real soon now. And yet, every time I try and get a quote on mounting a few panels on my roof, the cost is $25,000 and it will take me 30 years to break-even on the electricty."

Out of curiosity, where are you located? We did an install last year, and our payback time at the current electric rates is about seven years. If you assume the rates rise at the average 8% per year that they've been doing, it's even quicker. But we're in Arizona, where solar is a no-brainer. The panels have a 25-year *warranty* and a 40-year life is not unreasonable. The inverter will need replacing about once every 12 years, but that's a trivial cost compared to the savings. Even if we're only in the house for another ten years, we'll likely double our investment, before the resale value of the system when we sell the house is even taken into account.

Re:Tired of hearing about super efficient..

[phantomfive]

A lot of states offer subsidies for installing solar panels. My understanding is that Arizona is one of them. So when you say it cost you $X to install, it didn't really.

He has a point. As soon as solar panels are cheap enough, everyone will be doing them, no legislation needed. And by now they should be, based on the stories we've read.

Baloney!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a certain amount of sunlight incident on the earth surface, app. 1.2KW/m^2 times the cosine of the suns angle from the normal, on a perfectly clear day.

Just covering the earth surface with solar cells will catch all that power, minus a small amount of extra reflection at low angles.

There is no way to improve total power beyond that.

Only if solar panels are very expensive compared to their supporting structure does it pay to align them in a way that the Sunlight is hitting them normally (at an right angle).

There are three ways to optimize then:

a) fixing them in a position that faces the sun at an right angle during the time the sunlight is strongest, i.e. around noon. For that purpose, you can just mount them at an angle of app. 30 on a south-facing roof

b) actively tracking the sun

c) use mirrors to enlarge the effective respective cross-section of the panels

Before sensationally claiming a 140% improvement over existing configurations, you need state your design objectives. If it is active panel area, then origani-like mirrors may help - but TFA does not mention mirrors

If it is "comparative length and width" of the real estate used, as the article states, there is nothing to improve on flat panel.

I suspect this is just a bad writeup of a theoretical paper showing off some genetic design algorithms - don't hold your breath waiting for these concoctions to appear at your local Home Depot anytime soon!