Researchers have modified solar panels to generate electricity at night.
New research published in Applied Physics Letters beginning of April presents revolutionary solar panels. Stanford University researchers have modified commercially available photovoltaic panels. Results ? They are able to generate small amounts of electricity at night using a very special process.
Another way to generate energy
“We tend to think of the sun as the major renewable energy resource”, explique Shanhui Fan, the principal investigator of the project. He adds, “Space cold is also an extremely important renewable energy resource”.
Normally, photovoltaic panels do not produce solar energy at night. To change that, the researchers forgo the use of daylight and fall back on ‘radiative cooling’ or ‘radiative cooling’. Thanks to this phenomenon, a body cools down simply because its heat radiates into a space where the temperature is very low. In other words, imagine that when an object is positioned facing the sky at night, it radiates heat into space. It can therefore become colder than the air around it and these temperature differences can be used to generate electricity.
Clearly, a body radiates when it heats up, radiates. It emits light invisible to the naked eye in low temperatures. According to the physical laws of heat exchange, radiation from a hot object always radiates towards a colder surface. Thus, when a hot object is placed facing the sky at night, it emits radiation towards the sky and discharges its heat. So it cools.
For more targeted energy production
The researchers invented their prototype from a solar panel standard to which they added a thermoelectric generator. This is how the panels modified by the researchers produce 50 milliwatts of electricity per square meter at night. Which is much less than commercial solar panels that work during the day. By way of comparison, a commercial solar panel produces almost 200 watts of electricity per square meter.
But even if the amount of energy that these new panels produce is lower than that generated by traditional photovoltaic panels, it is still useful. For example, at night, when the energy demand is much lower. This technology can also be useful for certain low power density applications, charging devices and keeping sensors and monitoring devices online.
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