The solar Sunflower: The power of 5000 suns

The imposing capability of around 80% is a brilliant technology from Sunflower

Here Solar Sunflower uses a bouquet of separate reflector materials. So all parts of the reflector materials are looks a little different. To take care of from external elements or objects some of these reflectors are coated by using suitable methods. Solar reflectors are arranged like the shape of a flower and can be called as Sunflower.

You can see a bright spot at the mid part of the Sunflower. If you look cross-eyed, the power of this bright spot is within the range of about 1500 and 5000 suns.

Solar Sunflower control room

The Sunflower can be operated and controlled to trace the sun by move it around in two ways. The first method is manual control and the second method is using a tablet. Sunflower is made with fragments of lightweight concrete.

Solar power system includes the solar cells, solar charger controllers, solar panels, mounting systems. A solar sunflower is equipped to generate maximum electricity power using its reflectors and other associate equipment.

To protect the reflector from attack of external elements, a protective coating made of plastic is provided by using a giant machine. Gas is used as the collector material in Sunflower. The observable fact is that, the isolated Sunflower on a hill top is different from Sunflower that we created.

Concentrated solar thermal power and photovoltaic solar power put together to form this Sunflower, which is Sunflower. The neat and creative Sunflower package has total efficiency of about 80 percentages.

Advertisement

Solar energy is a large form of energy. This large amount of energy can be converted tin to electrical energy by using suitable mechanism of solar sunflower. IBM research in Zurich and Dsolar (a subsidiary of Airlight energy invented and developed solar Sunflower. They use HCPVT (Highly Efficient Concentrated Photovoltaic /Thermal)) to generate electric power from solar power and make water hot by using solar energy .The reflectors used in Sunflower are capable of concentrate power from one sun to about 5000 suns. It uses highly potent photovoltaic cells that able to perform the conversion process from solar energy to electrical energy without any type of melting. In solar Sunflower system the role of Airlight or Dsolar is mainly focus on the area of reflectors and their structure, while IBM produces photovoltaic for the system.

Concentrated solar thermal power and photovoltaic solar power are two fundamental technologies of solar Sunflower and they are more familiar and easily understandable. The special about Sunflower is that, it attain high efficiency by obtaining above mentioned two technologies together in an innovative manner.Explanation about this is not necessary since it is easy to understand

Airlight has tested a lot of different combination of reflector material forum glass to Mylar and finally decided to choose aluminum foil. Aluminium foil provides very high reflectance and it is not very costly, but need extra material to take care of it from external elements as it is very gauzy material. 

The structure of the reflector is slightly curved and mirror solar panels. The Sunflower consists of 6 petals and each has 6 reflectors to make a total 36 reflectors. Each block of 6 reflectors consists of a focal point called collectors. So for 36 reflectors, 6 collectors are used. The collectors are most important parts in reflectors, where actual working takes place.

The collector material used in reflectors should be suitably chosen by considering its capability to convert sunlight in to electricity. To get better efficiency of conversion, the sunlight should be focused on a very small region which need most appropriate cells. By considering this factor, an array of GaAs is used as photovoltaic cells. Comparing with silicon GaAs has 38 % efficient in converting solar energy into electricity, while silicon has 20%, but more expensive than silicon.

Array of GaAs cells in each collector is only few square centimeters in size, but can produce 2kw of electricity .Hence a total of 12kw electricity can be generated by using 6 collectors of a single Sunflower. The next important peculiarity of GaAs is that, its operating temperature is large, about 105 degrees Celsius. Comparing with most of other semiconductor material, which perform poorly when become hotter. But in the case of Sunflower, power of 5000 suns are focused on a single point, get heated at a temperature much more than 105 degree Celsius.

Airlight conducted two rests to understand the condition of reflector at high temperature. In the first test, Airlight use these reflectors to make a hole in a lump of iron having a melting point of 1538 degree Celsius. In the second test reflectors are placed misaligned and found molten aluminum dribble everywhere.

Cooling With Hot Water? Cool

From the above section, we realize that huge formation of temperature in reflectors is one of the important problems faced by Sunflower. The one and only solution to this is use an effective and appropriate cooling system to make temperature down to optimized level.

IBM already uses some cooling system in supercomputers. Heat is one of the important factors in processing power used by a computer system. Tiny computer chips are arranged in large numbers to form an IU Server chassis Cooling of this system can be done by using liquid cooling mechanism.

IBM focused on advanced cooling system in computers to improve its density and reduce the power usage and hence the cost also. IBM use liquid cooling system for this purpose. It mainly consists of three parts, a water block, pump and a radiator.

Water block is made up of a lump of metal consists of a channel to flow the liquid. The most commonly used liquid is water, but sometimes Fluorinert or mineral oil is used. This mechanism involves transfer of heat from computer chips to the following liquid, which is passed through the radiator and discharged to the atmosphere.

This system is not an efficient one, because of two reasons. The first reason is that, there is a limit of heat transfer through the liquid flow and the second is the wastage of energy in the form of heat, when it is radiated to atmosphere.

Solutions to these two problems are discovered by IBM. They use a new technology called “hot water cooling technology”. In this technology, the heat energy is converted in to a usable form without make it waste.

Instead of passing to radiator and released to atmosphere, the heat energy obtained from hot water is used for home purposes such as cooking and industrial processes such as drying, pasteurization, desalination etc.

As an example, IBM uses hot water to Heat University, building in Aquasar, a supercomputer at ETH in Zurich.

The second method of solution they adopted is to increase the amount of heat transfer from chips to water (liquid).For this purpose IBM use silicon with micro fluidic channels instead of water block. This arrangement of silicon with large number of tiny channels, are placed on the back side of the computer, have a capability to bring water to small areas of heat generating transistors and absorbed it .Hence we can say that water can pass through “hotspots” on the chips, which is small active region than other, and increase the heat transfer through each channels. Thus the problem with less amount of heat transfer can be solved ion a simple way.

OK, get back to the Solar Sunflowers

The cooling technology used in solar Sunflower is almost same as that of computer chips. Here, slices of silicon are cemented to the backside of GaAs cells as a substitute to computer chips. This cooling system wipeout the thermal energy from 5000 suns and increases the efficiency of converting photons in to electrons. The solar Sunflower device totally produce two forms of energy such as electrical energy of about 12kw and thermal energy about 21kw , which makes the temperature of water coolant up to 90 degree Celsius.

The actual price of a single Sunflower is not published by IBM or Airlight, but we can expect a cost in the range of about tens or thousands of pounds. The solar Sunflower system faces some problems also. The first one is, related with the working condition. The solar power can be utilized only with direct sunlight, any obstruction in the part of sunlight, present in sky or atmosphere, reduce power generation considerably. The software part of Sunflower consist of a mechanism to tracks the sun automatically, but IBM not revealed, how much the system is effective and how it works against problems caused by clouds. 

The second problem faced is related with the energy density or the capacity of the system. The efficiency of the system is more, but its capacity to produce electrical energy is less (12 kw).This energy can only be utilized for three or four hours to work home appliances during few hours, available only with the presence of direct sunlight in day timings. To use the power from sun as conventional source of energy for a city or a street, mechanisms should be implemented to store solar energy and use it when sunlight is not clearly available situations such as evenings, winter seasons and tempestuous periods.

The last but most important problem is the expense needed to implement the system. The cost of bog-standard silicon solar cell was about $1.60 to produce 1 watt of electrical energy, when Airlight and IBM start their work on solar Sunflower.

After china came to start production, the cost of production has dropped abruptly about 25p(40 cents) per watt improvement in the efficiency of silicon PVs also.

Solar Sunflower can’t enter in to a field of competition with hectares of boring-ass silicon photovoltaic’s, because of the expense utilized in GaAs cell, extravagant plumbing, control system and motors, bulk use of concrete material, and the time taken to combine all this and make it functional.

Flaming flowers that brightly blaze, swirling clouds in violet haze

Even though solar Sunflower facing a lot of problems, Switzerland has still hoped that, they can germinate million of solar Sunflower from the Alps. Now a day, most of the companies, real estate development, government officers, hotel resorts etc are doing everything to attach more with nature. Most of them actively involved in communities, or themselves, to make something different, in a business, point of view, some soft factors very much help to overcome problems than using hard factors. Instead of growing green plants to make green roof, silicon solar panels can be placed on roof top to produce electricity from sunlight in cheaper way and we can called it as green Electricity. The other option is fit a solar Sunflower in the garden to make others think that you are adhere to green environment, is not a proper way.

In energy production and distribution market, Solar Sunflower ha s its place. Sunflower should increase its production to fix a strong position in the market. A total of amount 1.2gw of electricity can be produced per year if Airlight and IBM can sell 100000 Sunflowers during that period. If we assume a single Sunflower costs about£ 30000, which makes £3 billion in one year sales. From the measures we can conclude that, a small amount of electrical energy can be generate by spending a large amount of money.

In 2016, Airlight energy, planning to sell some solar Sunflower to early adopters and in 2017, they enter into full commercial manufacturing capacity. Now the available sunflower in Switzerland was a fully working prototype, but final version will look more attractive.