Baby It’s Cold Outside, But Solar is Heating Up

by: David Nickelson, Director of Research

With much of the US blanketed under an early season snow or dealing with frigid temperatures, sunflowers are probably the furthest thing from your minds. However, a recent technology breakthrough inspired by the iconic blooms has the potential to provide a major leap forward in solar energy generation. 

One of the difficulties in optimizing energy production from solar power is correctly positioning the light collecting cells to face the sun. To date this challenge has been met with fixed cells or motorized positioners such as the Smartflower, but researchers at the University of California Los Angeles and Arizona State University have unveiled a technology they term SUNbots.

This new technology mimics a property of living plants called phototropism which allows the plant to bend to face the sun throughout the day, thereby collecting the largest amount of sunlight energy. In tests, the new materials allowed solar cells mounted on them to collect up to 400% more solar energy throughout the day. This has the potential to transform high efficiency solar collection from about 24% efficiency to nearly 90%, a number that could completely transform the fundamental cost factors of solar energy production. 

The photovoltaic effect isn't new. It was discovered in 1839 by French scientist Edmond Becquerel, when he was just 19. The challenge is that we are not willing/able/motivated to produce more energy with solar and with climate change squarely upon us we really need to do more with renewable energy sources and the SUNbots concept appears to be a quite promising new direction.

Do you have a unique or novel idea for new solar innovations or advancements? You should research whether they are patent-protection worthy. Talk to us here at Techson - we have a unique & novel technology we call Limestone that can assist in your idea’s research.

We ran an instant Limestone Patentability report, or “LPAT” report based upon the text of the above linked SUNbots article. The technology is published as WIPO publication WO 2018/191403 A1.

Comment or hit us at info@techsonip.com to receive a copy.

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