A new solar concentrator from Ph.D. student Jason Karp of the University of California, San Diego collects sunlight with thousands of small lenses imprinted on a common sheet. All these lenses couple into a flat "waveguide" which funnels light to a single photovoltaic cell.
In the video below, Karp explains that his design minimizes the cost for the optics associated with the entire system. One path to building optics very cheaply leads engineers to existing manufacturing techniques. The new solar concentrator is compatible with existing roll-to-roll processing techniques involved in fabricating large televisions.
Transcript
00:00:00 when we place one of these micro optic concentrators out in the sun that collect sunlight uh what happens is we have lots of little lenses that are collecting the light and each one of these lenses is now coupling that light into a a big piece of glass a slab of glass that is capturing all the light from thousands of apertures and then all this light is getting channeled to one
00:00:20 one location and at that location that's where we're placing a photovoltaic and this is going to be the device that actually converts that sunlight into electricity so the path is a bit different in that it comes from the top and now is getting moved sideways and being confined within a new medium and that Medium is this this slab of glass and that's the wave guide the real uh
00:00:38 thrust the real reason that we're trying to do this this type of concentrator uh is is certainly for cost we want to try and minimize uh the cost of the components and really minimize the cost of the Optics but the Optics also associated with the entire system so when we can start to look at how do we build Optics very cheaply we need to be looking at what technologies do we have
00:00:57 to build them and one of the primary technologies that we have is roll to- roll processing and these big large batch processes that are fabricating uh large televisions and other large area pieces of glass that we see in in everyday Electronics so we're really trying to use the things that we have learned from from other uh other fabrication Technologies and try to
00:01:17 apply that in ways that we can build Optics on a large scale for solar power what I've done so far is really the research and looking at uh the trade-offs associated um with this type of design what happens when you collect light using this type of of geometry um how that translates to a commercial product uh there's certainly a path there um I don't know exactly what that
00:01:39 commercial product would look like um there's several aspects of the design that we're exploring uh and how we can manipulate the light once we have sunlight in a wave guide uh we can do all sorts of interesting things um and how that would actually translate into your your final consumer product and what you could put on your house or in your backyard um is still uh still to be
00:01:59 determined so a solar concentrator is just a any kind of optic that is going to collect sunlight and focus it onto something else your simple magnifying glass uh in your your you know experiment can be a solar concentrator [Music]
