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13-Year-Old Uses Fibonacci Sequence For Solar Power Breakthrough
An anonymous reader tips news of 7th grader Aidan Dwyer, who used phyllotaxis — the way leaves are arranged on plant stems in nature — as inspiration to arrange an array of solar panels in a way that generates 20-50% more energy than a uniform, flat panel array. Aidan wrote,
"I designed and built my own test model, copying the Fibonacci pattern of an oak tree. I studied my results with the compass tool and figured out the branch angles. The pattern was about 137 degrees and the Fibonacci sequence was 2/5. Then I built a model using this pattern from PVC tubing. In place of leaves, I used PV solar panels hooked up in series that produced up to 1/2 volt, so the peak output of the model was 5 volts. The entire design copied the pattern of an oak tree as closely as possible. ... The Fibonacci tree design performed better than the flat-panel model. The tree design made 20% more electricity and collected 2 1/2 more hours of sunlight during the day. But the most interesting results were in December, when the Sun was at its lowest point in the sky. The tree design made 50% more electricity, and the collection time of sunlight was up to 50% longer!"His work earned him a Young Naturalist Award from the American Museum of Natural History and a provisional patent on the design.
After all, it stands to reason that nature would have already worked out the most efficient way to collect solar energy eons ago.
The two aren't mutually exclusive!
so it's available in branches everywhere.
Check out this image: http://inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/08/The-Secret-of-the-Fibonacci-Sequence-in-Trees-3.jpg
He's used 18 cells on the tree, but 10 in the flat array. So an increase of 80% in cell numbers results in an increase of 20-50% in yield. I don't see a massive future for this.
I can see them now..."Wtf? He patented how I arrange my fucking solar panels?"
science ought to look to take ideas from evolution every chance they get. usually there is a reason these sort of elements of nature are arranged as they are. is this kid the first to do that with solar tech?
Well, if you look at the photos, he WAS outside much of the time!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Looking at TFA, the pictures show the solar "tree" is a foot or two higher than the conventional solar array, which is barely a couple of inches off the ground - so is it really so surprising that it performed much better when the sun was lower?
It's a neat idea though and would love to see the kid continue with it :)
I've got news for Mr. Santayana: we're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.
Usually, panel rotation systems are finicky and require a fair amount of maintenance. Plus, they consume power, thus directly affecting the net gain. Depending on the specifics, it may be that this arrangement is more efficient. As for the additional panels, you can see my response above too.
You caught part of it , but even positioning of the flat array versus his "tree" skewed the results. There were times he shows where the tree was not in shade but the flat panel was fully in shade. The claims of increased efficiency ignore using panels that have mechanisms to allow them to track the sun. Plus he isn't measuring the right output of photo cells, he should have measured energy production.
As for his idea of trees, btdt http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3206/2807030740_25f3f2fa53.jpg
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
The two aren't mutually exclusive!
Thank you!
That's right. I wish we'd dump this whole "nerd" and "jock" dichotomy. There are quite a few talented scientists who also happened to be damn good athletes. I actually knew one who was a "jock' in college who went on for his PhD in Chemistry and did some ground breaking research in ceramic lasers and another one who competes regularly in triathlons.
I also know some "geeks" who don't do anything physical because they pigeon holed themselves as geeks and therefore sit on their asses playing video games for recreation.
I also knew some jocks who are so into sports, they went to medical school to become sports docs or nutritionists.
The Greeks knew of the mind/body connection and I wish we continued that tradition more in our society.
This is exactly the type of thing the patent system was _not_ intended to protect.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The site is already Slashdotted. Here is the CORAL link:
http://www.amnh.org.nyud.net/nationalcenter/youngnaturalistawards/2011/aidan.html
His idea is based upon something that has existed since ... forever. It took a bright 13 year old to see it.
Willie...
How many of you took time at the tender age of 13 to study leaf patterns on trees to figure out how best to capture sunlight and harness it for electricity? You can crap on his science all you want, but kids like this young man inspire me and give me hope that we aren't raising a bunch of video-game addicted sluggards who take everything for granted. Hooray for science and kids who want to pursue it! We want to encourage this behavior, not nit-pick him for possible flaws in research methodology.
I am more impressed by the documentation and accreditation on the website!
After all, it stands to reason that nature would have already worked out the most efficient way to collect solar energy eons ago.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unintelligent_design .
- He set the flat array at an angle of 45 degrees. Is that the optimum angle for solar panels at his latitude?
- as mentioned elsewhere, more panels in the tree array.
- The photos show both arrays being partly shaded by trees in the yard. Since the arrays aren't at exactly the same position, the amount of shade can be different. The tree array is at an advantage: more distance between the panels means that it's less likely that more than one panel is shaded by a tree branch.
Still, it's an interesting result that raises a few questions:
- in current solar panels, the wafers are connected to their beighbors to minimise the amount of wiring. But this means that whole panel drops its output below the threshold if one row of wafers is shaded by a tree branch. Maybe we'd get more energy out of an array if we connected distant wafers in series instead, so a tree branch shadow is less likely to drop the output of a series of wafers below the threshold.
- is it possible to increase the output of an array by putting parts of it at different horizontal or vertical angles?
It appears we crashed the AMNH web site. Perhaps they need more power themselves?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
wooosh!
I'm going to plant one of these. In addition, I'll put all the wires I've ripped out of the house, during a rewiring session, into the compost bin. Later in the year, I can spread the electrical compost around the base of the solar power tree and it will grow and grow. Soon I'll need a different blade on the chainsaw to control the thing!
earned him ... a provisional patent on the design
Two things. One, there is no such thing as a provisional patent. There are provisional patent applications, but provisional patent applications are not separately examined, and patents do not issue from them. They are merely a procedural tool to get yourself an extra year of time to decide whether a patent is worth pursuing on your invention. The only things you need to get yourself a provisional patent application are a specification, a drawing (if applicable), and the filing fee.
Two, the issuance of a patent is not an endorsement of your invention. It merely indicates that the government believes that your patent application satisfies all of the statutory requirements for issuance of a patent. So, it significantly overstates the matter to say that a person "earned" a patent.
While I agree he should have compared angled solar panels (anyone that has done anything with solar knows a panel facing south (in the northern hemisphere) will get more light than a panel laying flat, I think the idea he is going for here is for statically mounted panels such as would go on a building, not for huge solar arrays that have motor guidance etc. Besides, there is a great deal of loss from running the motors, so this could still be more efficient (although a great deal more testing would be needed to know that). Give the kid a break, at least he is trying to think - most of the other kids are playing video games which while entertaining, they don't do much for the imagination IMHO.
Get a web developer
One of the four standards by which prospective Rhodes Scholars are judged is, "energy to use one’s talents to the full, as exemplified by fondness for, and success in, sports."
Somehow, I don't think the OP was being entirely serious.
I've never understood this "buy the patent and bury it" meme. For one thing, if something is patented, it's published. Period. For another, patents expire. We should be neck-deep in 100 MPG carbuerators by now.
RTFA both questions are answered. Both models are staticdelieratley so he can compare their performance. Both models use the SAME NUMBER,SIZE AND TYPE of panels.
At this rate, solar will soon be as common and cheap as sunlight! I for one cannot wait for our solar powered overlords.
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Plenty of web pages address this. Here's an example:
http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/conceptual_study_of_a_solar_power_satellite_sps_2000.shtml
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
...something that has been posted online? Not only is it archived "forever' here in Slashdot, but other mirrors, like "The Internet Archive", Google's cache, etc. It's too late to "bury" it, now.
Willie...
Minor quibble: the misuse of 'spiral'.
In that case, I'm calling you on the misuse of "_x increase". The "x" means to multiply. Multiplying by 1 is not an increase. You meant either a "100% increase" or a "2x increase".
Right; I did have to go outside every once in a while for my astronomy habit.
Rotating the flat panel will enable it to collect many times what the tree can (which rotating does nothing for).
Many plants rotate their leaves to follow the sun (to maximize photosynthesis) and orientate them vertically during the night (in order to shade or protect them during the resting period). I know this from watching my chilli plants grow. For them this action is more profound when they are young and growing fast. Older plants seem to be much lazier and slower in orienting their leaves. Maybe leaf quantity becomes quality of it's own and following the sun movent accurately becomes unnecessary or wastes more energy.
Like a lot of other submitters, you are basing all of your whining on a couple of pictures - which do not show the actual set up of the study.
Whining incorrectly about other people's work is utter bullshit.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The tree design can catch the light that's reflected off the wall behind it, at least in the image shown.
He says he moved the test location around - I'd like to see the other locations.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
Also are the problems of manufacturing costs and space usage. Rather than paying for an elaborate and expensive support structure that mimics a tree and uses up your entire yard, I would guess a tracking system would be cheaper, and provide better output.
Apologies if someone else has noted this, but a provisional patent means nothing. It is a mere filing without review and has no substance other than being a time stamp that can be later referenced in a real filing. I can put a roll of toilet paper in an envelope and pay $85 and have a 'Provisional Patent'
It's good to see an iterated function system being used in a practical manner. They looked pretty on computer screens back in the 90s, but it's much more impressive to see someone make a useful gadget with the idea. I bet with a couple more iterations of the stem/branch/leaf model he could bump up the energy collection even more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterated_function_system
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
It's because most of the folks promoting these ideas really don't understand how the patent system works. Having said that, I have seen interesting results first-hand with one of the vapor carburetor designs on my dad's '79 Suburban. He was ultimately able to get it to peak at about 45 mpg on the highway, but it was pretty finicky and he had to install some extra plumbing to allow the truck to use the OEM hardware when the engine was cold and at low speeds, as the high-efficiency design simply didn't work under those conditions. It was cool as a novelty, but he concluded that it just wasn't practical for day-to-day use.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
He even made the common bar graph mistake (more) of not starting the scale from zero, instead starting from 4v, which makes the 4.1-4.4v flat solar panel appear as if it puts out less than half of the 5.25 volt from the solar tree.
Mistake? That kid's management material!
In addition to the oversights mentioned by other posters (panels in partial shade, putting panels on the north side where they will never see any sun), it seems that he also neglected to attach a load to the outputs of the cells. This greatly skews the results in favor of the tree arrangement of the cells. If a solar cell does not have a resistive load attached, applying a small amount of light to it quickly raises the voltage across it to a maximum value, and increasing the intensity of the light does not increase the voltage any further. This is visible in the graph of the voltage on his standard design: on most days, the voltage quickly jumps from 0 to nearly maximum voltage and stays constant over the day. If the voltage measured actually described the incoming power, it would show a clear maximum at noon and gradually decrease at earlier and later times as the sunlight becomes less direct. What he has effectively measured is the number of cells being exposed to any sunlight at all. For his "standard" design, only half of the cells are ever in the sun, where for the tree design, it would seem that more than half are in the sun on average, since none of the panels seem to face downward as they would if the orientation were random. I think he would find that, if he would actually measure the power produced, the south-facing panels would produce more, since they face the sun more directly, on average, than somewhat randomly oriented panels.
Either there is a conspiracy going on somewhere trying to hide this technology from making any real advances, so that we stay on oil, or our engineers in solar energy collection, are being upstaged by 13 year olds.....from using human hair as a 0 expense materials cost, to having this fibonacci enduced tray for collecting susn resulting in a more efficient collection.
Sad really...
I don't really understand this. If you can increase the output simply by angling them differently, you could do that with a traditional design that packs more cells per inch and simply do away with a tree or use something akin to a molten salt reactor in the middle with panels around it in the shape of a circular U on a pivot. Such flower petal design (depending on how wide it is) would take advantage of everything this does except it would have a higher height density. You could even remove the moving part of it and make it a tad wider if you want to avoid moving parts.
While it is cool to design something after nature, you have to think a bit further into why nature made it that way in the first place. Like leaves are redundant as the tree itself cannot move, so some leaves generate more output depending on the time of day and angle. Upon closer look, his flat panel design doesn't pivot at all either, unlike most modern flat panel designs that power companies use (which are usually U shaped as well).
Cool thing to mess around with as a kid, other then that this isn't really ground breaking.
I'd love to see a comparison of cost between his version and fixed/mobile versions.
A quick google/wikipedia shows that movable "tracking" systems generate between 30-40% more power annually than an otherwise identical fixed set of panels. So is that 10% gain - which we have to take his word for since the term "study" is a little generous - worth it?
(King, D.L. and Boyson, W.E. and Kratochvil, J.A. (May 2002). "Analysis of factors influencing the annual energy production of photovoltaic systems".)
Also, how resistant is this to damage compared to more common designs?
Why would a sane person live in an area controlled by an HOA?
I thought America was all about freedom?
Yeah seriously - Stephen Hawking a rower in college. How does that fit into your view of the world?
You're also more likely to be able to integrate "tree like" photo-voltaics into public spaces than you would flat-panel eye-sores.
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Being in the solar "tree" business, I'm intrigued. Maybe it makes more energy. But there is another value: giving solar a physical presence that looks good (with refinement). Most solar power is generated on commercial rooftops and in "farms" on the ground where no one can see. If it takes the form of something attractive and visible, people will be more willing to pay for it, and it will influence more people to consider solar. The Prius delivers this same sort of physical statement of values. And, since a tree IS a solar-optimized organism, it seems appropriate to try to make solar power generation devices that recall trees. Technical note: I've seen only a few pictures of the test setup. They show the tree very close to the reflective surface of a wall. Light is coming off the wall and hitting solar cells oriented at that angle.
Live oaks, blue oaks, and some other variations are evergreen.
It looks like he set the flat array at an angle of 45 degrees and that it was never moved. Every major solar farm uses active tracking of the sun to point each solar panel directly at the sun in a way that maximizes surface area. I'm pretty sure every collection technique that doesn't involve the electricity generating medium has already been thought and is either being used or has been ruled out.
One major problem I see with this design is that is very susceptible to wind damage. This is one of the biggest problems in sunny, dry areas. The wind picks up sand and dirt and eats away at the solar panels. Big flat panels tend to deflect the wind to a large degree. A tree-like design would have wind blow right through it and get chewed up quick fast. Cleaning the panels would also be a very hard and probably manual job. Large solar farms has this process fully automated.
I had to straighten my father out one night regarding this very myth. I explained it thusly: When the barbarians were at Britain's doorstep during WW Deuce, and the same barbarians were trying to conquer northern Africa for the oil routes, I'm pretty sure the respective leadership was not concerned about protecting the oil industry's profits and wouldn't have ignored this mythical marvelous fuel efficient carburetor.
That something is patented doesn't mean it's fully researched, developed and made into a manufacturable design. There's a lot of "even if we were to invest money into it, and even if we were to succeed, it's still be patented by someone else who'd bury us" that keeps companies away. And even if patents expire, it's amazing what you can do by patenting minor enhancements and variations, even if they would eventually get invalidated it'll create a lot of legal costs, hassle and risk premium on the investment.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Yeah seriously - Stephen Hawking a rower in college. How does that fit into your view of the world?
He wasn't a rower, he was the coxswain in the Oxford boat.
Sigs. We don't need no steenking sigs.
I'll set aside some potential issues with Mr. Dwyer's initial experiment. It's the stuff better experiments are made from, not a reason to crap on it.
My first thought was to wonder how well the fixed flat and tree arrays would measure up to a flat array with a solar tracker. Obviously, the tracking array would eat the fixed flat array's lunch. That "leaves" us to compare the tracking array with a further optimized version of the tree, grist for next year's experiment:
-> How would the trade off in complexity and maintenance requirements of the tracking array compare against the (presumably) lower power output of the tree?
-> How about in industrialized v. non-industrialized regions?
-> Would the tree benefit from the addition of a single axis of rotation to provide optimum sun exposure? Is there an optimum exposure?
Luke, help me take this mask off
The only thing wrong here is the immbecile title given to this on Slashdot. No-one is claiming this is a breakthrough. The kid did an experiment and wrote it up well. Like any kid, and indeed any researcher, he made mistakes. Maybe he's onto something, but probably not. Regardless, he's welcome to patent it. Certainly he learned a lot about nature and about renewable energy in the process, and caring is the first step to solving any problem.
There is no such thing as a provisional patent. Normally, you file a nonprovisional patent application. The Patent Office examines the patent and then decides whether to grant a patent or not. It's also possible to file a provisional patent application. For this type, the patent office never examines the application. It gives the applicant a year to decide whether to follow through or not (i.e., commercialize, raise money or whatever). Before the year is up, the applicant has to file a nonprovisional application, which is then examined.
The above description is for "utility patents." Those are the normal type of patents on inventions. There is a second type of patent called a "design patent." However, for these, there is no "provisional application."
I'm guessing this kid has a provisional patent application on file. He probably doesn't have a patent and it is for a utility not design patent. (Design patents are just for an ornamental design.)
Kudos to the kid! Can't you just see promenades lined with digital oak trees used as back stops for the wireless-connected intelligentsia playing "Angry Birds!" :D
All "Kidding" aside... Congratulations and great job kid...!
~ "From the brains of babes..." :) ~
cleaning one of those things is going to be a bitch.
Impressive thinking and writing for a 13 year old, assuming that it's mostly his work (always a question with school science projects). However, see a detailed analysis of why claiming some kind of breakthrough is wrong: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:JmlMNqVPKlsJ:uvdiv.blogspot.com/2011/08/solar-panel-trees-really-are-inferior.html%20http://uvdiv.blogspot.com/2011/08/solar-panel-trees-really-are-inferior.html
Very brief cliffs: 1) He measured open circuit voltage with no load, which tells you nothing about actual power that it can produce under load 2) Broken theory: sum of the outputs over time is simply the sum of the individual outputs, and will be maximized by having all individual outputs at the optimal angle
Here's a flash, black is not the best color for absorbing solar energy. It's just the best for absorbing IR energy. The Air Force researched this in the 50 for survival gear. The best color is *green*. If you don't think so, tell me why plants aren't all black!
It's quite true that moving solar panels takes energy, and it's entirely possible that a configuration could be achieved that obtains a clean-room efficiency higher than (tracking panel - motor energy).
Notice though, that I said clean-room. Just wait until birds start nesting in your artificial trees, or a wind storm starts knocking panels off. Not to mention the added cost of building the tree to put the panels on in the first place.
If we're going to examine the issues related to flat panels, let's not ignore the issues caused by that.... thing. Again, a good paper would have at least hinted at such possible issues.
Nice! I can imagine that many variations of this model could be simulated and tested virtually much faster (3D scene with ray-tracing). Evolutionary algorithms could help find the most efficient constructions which would be then tested in reality.. What a thesis that would be.. :)