OS Retractable Mobile Solar Power System (GSR-110B) is a portable power source from solar panels that can be rolled up (retractable).
With a similar shape as a screen for the projector, GSR-110B can produce up to 40 watts of power source in which the solar panel contribute 16 watts and the built-in battery 24 watts.
We have previously discussed about the LG Solar Hybrid Air Conditioner, the air conditioner that can generate electricity through solar panels. Unfortunately it produced only enough electricity for air cleaning machines only.
Gree Electric Appliances, one of China’s air conditioner manufacturers announced that they will begin to sell about 50,000 units of solar powered air conditioning to the United States in the near future and further to the domestic market (China).
Edan Kurzweil has come up with Solar Path Lighting known as the Night Owl.
Paths and street lighting units are illuminated through a high-output LED clusters that rely on batteries charged by large flexible polymer solar film established on the top of the lamp. Lights will also be hardwired into the electricity network in the city to return the extra solar energy back into the city or to attract a minimum charge for a long winter, or extended periods of time without sunlight. Solar module is covered within the transparent sphere that reduces the accumulation of debris, which in turn reduces maintenance costs.
This is the coolest outdoor shower I’ve ever seen!
This solar garden water shower is easy to run and ecologically friendly shower for the garden. Simply connect it to a normal garden hose and within 30 minutes (on a clear day), you’ll have enough hot water up to 5 showers.
Adventures in microsolar supported by microelectronics and MEMS techniques
Representative thin crystalline-silicon photovoltaic cells – these are from 14 to 20 micrometers thick and 0.25 to 1 millimeter across.
Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used.
The tiny cells could turn a person into a walking solar battery charger if they were fastened to flexible substrates molded around unusual shapes, such as clothing.
The solar particles, fabricated of crystalline silicon, hold the potential for a variety of new applications. They are expected eventually to be less expensive and have greater efficiencies than current photovoltaic collectors that are pieced together with 6-inch- square solar wafers.
The cells are fabricated using microelectronic and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) techniques common to today’s electronic foundries.
Sandia lead investigator Greg Nielson said the research team has identified more than 20 benefits of scale for its microphotovoltaic cells. These include new applications, improved performance, potential for reduced costs and higher efficiencies.
“Eventually units could be mass-produced and wrapped around unusual shapes for building-integrated solar, tents and maybe even clothing,” he said. This would make it possible for hunters, hikers or military personnel in the field to recharge batteries for phones, cameras and other electronic devices as they walk or rest.
Sandia project lead Greg Nielson holds a solar cell test prototype with a microscale lens array fastened above it. Together, the cell and lens help create a concentrated photovoltaic unit.
Even better, such microengineered panels could have circuits imprinted that would help perform other functions customarily left to large-scale construction with its attendant need for field construction design and permits.
Said Sandia field engineer Vipin Gupta, “Photovoltaic modules made from these microsized cells for the rooftops of homes and warehouses could have intelligent controls, inverters and even storage built in at the chip level. Such an integrated module could greatly simplify the cumbersome design, bid, permit and grid integration process that our solar technical assistance teams see in the field all the time.”
For large-scale power generation, said Sandia researcher Murat Okandan, “One of the biggest scale benefits is a significant reduction in manufacturing and installation costs compared with current PV techniques.”
Part of the potential cost reduction comes about because microcells require relatively little material to form well-controlled and highly efficient devices.
From 14 to 20 micrometers thick (a human hair is approximately 70 micrometers thick), they are 10 times thinner than conventional 6-inch-by-6-inch brick-sized cells, yet perform at about the same efficiency.
100 times less silicon generates same amount of electricity
“So they use 100 times less silicon to generate the same amount of electricity,” said Okandan. “Since they are much smaller and have fewer mechanical deformations for a given environment than the conventional cells, they may also be more reliable over the long term.”
Another manufacturing convenience is that the cells, because they are only hundreds of micrometers in diameter, can be fabricated from commercial wafers of any size, including today’s 300-millimeter (12-inch) diameter wafers and future 450-millimeter (18-inch) wafers. Further, if one cell proves defective in manufacture, the rest still can be harvested, while if a brick-sized unit goes bad, the entire wafer may be unusable. Also, brick-sized units fabricated larger than the conventional 6-inch-by-6-inch cross section to take advantage of larger wafer size would require thicker power lines to harvest the increased power, creating more cost and possibly shading the wafer. That problem does not exist with the small-cell approach and its individualized wiring.
From left to right, Sandia researchers Murat OKandan, Greg Nielson, and Jose Luis Cruz-Campa, hold samples containing arrays of microsolar cells.
Other unique features are available because the cells are so small. “The shade tolerance of our units to overhead obstructions is better than conventional PV panels,” said Nielson, “because portions of our units not in shade will keep sending out electricity where a partially shaded conventional panel may turn off entirely.”
Because flexible substrates can be easily fabricated, high-efficiency PV for ubiquitous solar power becomes more feasible, said Okandan.
A commercial move to microscale PV cells would be a dramatic change from conventional silicon PV modules composed of arrays of 6-inch-by-6-inch wafers. However, by bringing in techniques normally used in MEMS, electronics and the light-emitting diode (LED) industries (for additional work involving gallium arsenide instead of silicon), the change to small cells should be relatively straightforward, Gupta said.
Each cell is formed on silicon wafers, etched and then released inexpensively in hexagonal shapes, with electrical contacts prefabricated on each piece, by borrowing techniques from integrated circuits and MEMS.
Offering a run for their money to conventional large wafers of crystalline silicon, electricity presently can be harvested from the Sandia-created cells with 14.9 percent efficiency. Off-the-shelf commercial modules range from 13 to 20 percent efficient.
A widely used commercial tool called a pick-and-place machine — the current standard for the mass assembly of electronics — can place up to 130,000 pieces of glitter per hour at electrical contact points preestablished on the substrate; the placement takes place at cooler temperatures. The cost is approximately one-tenth of a cent per piece with the number of cells per module determined by the level of optical concentration and the size of the die, likely to be in the 10,000 to 50,000 cell per square meter range. An alternate technology, still at the lab-bench stage, involves self-assembly of the parts at even lower costs.
Solar concentrators — low-cost, prefabricated, optically efficient microlens arrays — can be placed directly over each glitter-sized cell to increase the number of photons arriving to be converted via the photovoltaic effect into electrons. The small cell size means that cheaper and more efficient short focal length microlens arrays can be fabricated for this purpose.
High-voltage output is possible directly from the modules because of the large number of cells in the array. This should reduce costs associated with wiring, due to reduced resistive losses at higher voltages.
Other possible applications for the technology include satellites and remote sensing.
The project combines expertise from Sandia’s Microsystems Center; Photovoltaics and Grid Integration Group; the Materials, Devices, and Energy Technologies Group; and the National Renewable Energy Lab’s Concentrating Photovoltaics Group.
Involved in the process, in addition to Nielson, Okandan and Gupta, are Jose Luis Cruz-Campa, Paul Resnick, Tammy Pluym, Peggy Clews, Carlos Sanchez, Bill Sweatt, Tony Lentine, Anton Filatov, Mike Sinclair, Mark Overberg, Jeff Nelson, Jennifer Granata, Craig Carmignani, Rick Kemp, Connie Stewart, Jonathan Wierer,
George Wang, Jerry Simmons, Jason Strauch, Judith Lavin and Mark Wanlass (NREL).
The work is supported by DOE’s Solar Energy Technology Program and Sandia’s Laboratory Directed Research & Development program, and has been presented at four technical conferences this year.
The ability of light to produce electrons, and thus electricity, has been known for more than a hundred years.
Executive Summary about Solar Cooker by Detlef Warner
Cooking with a solar cooker is one more way that you too can go green!
A solar cooker, or solar oven, is mechanism that uses sunlight to cook food rather than electricity or gas. Solar cookers come in several different varieties: A box cooker, panel cooker, and a parabolic cooker. While a box cooker is a better choice when you’re looking to cook a large amount of food, a parabolic cooker is capable of cooking the food faster.
Solar cookers will take more time than a traditional oven, with the exception of a parabolic cooker, so you should plan on allowing approximately two times the regular cooking time. Solar cookers are readily available both online and in stores. You can construct a solar oven out of something as simple as cardboard and in a short amount of time be cooking your first solar meal!
How to Make a Solar Cooker? – Making a Homemade DIY Solar Cooker
Executive Summary about Solar Cooker by Dinna Bonevi
Isn’t it a wonderful idea to make a homemade DIY solar cooker, then cooking under the sun? Clues are: it’s energy source is free, environment friendly, comparable to latest cooker but with great discount, pocket friendly and absolutely can’t operate without the help from the mother sun. I’m talking of having a solar cooker, cooking under the sun project.
Will you spend some bucks or rather choose the pocket friendly unit? I guess all of us prefer money saving units. Absolutely it could, the sun continuously gives us the heat and solar energy more than we ever need. So, the solar cooker, cooking under the sun project is definitely durable when we speak of operational source of energy.
Let’s try to make use of readily available sources within the vicinity for our solar cooker.
Things needed:
- Foils or mirrors as reflectors
- Conductive Materials
- Stand (for the food)
The construction of a solar cooker is very easy. A solar cooker is usually a box style that’s made with conductive supplies. The longer it is exposed to the sun the hotter the unit gets. The reflectors help centralize the solar heat on the food that will be cooked.
The solar cooker could reach as high as 300 degrees temperature. Knowing on how to make a homemade DIY solar cooker project is another fun project for everyone. Enjoy the heat and let’s eat!
Article You May Be Interested In Reading: Solar Garden Lights
Executive Summary about Solar Battery Charger by Anna Stone
Solar Battery Chargers are used to charge your batteries when you are not connected to the power grids and do not have access to another form of electricity. The way a Solar Charger works is simple. The solar panel of the battery charger collects energy from the sun and converts this into electricity. Now, there are many different types of solar battery chargers, as well as different types of batteries you might want to charge. Some solar chargers are more powerful than others. As all solar battery chargers use some type of solar panel, the amount of power they generate generally depends on the size of the panels. Solar panels are made up of individual solar cells. Solar cells are the units which create electricity out of sunlight. The more solar cells there are on a solar panel, the more electricity they create. So you will generally find that bigger solar panels produced more energy, and smaller solar panels produce less.
Some solar battery chargers work with simple AA batteries, like those that you would use to run a flashlight. Some charge the batteries of your equipment, such as the battery in your laptop computer.
You might ask why one uses a solar charger to charge a battery, instead of just directly running one’s equipment from a solar panel.
The sun’s heat might damage your cell phone. There are a variety of solar battery chargers and other portable solar power devices available on the market today. Further information and answers to common questions can be found at Solar Chargers and Portable Solar Power Devices.
How Solar Powered Battery Chargers Can Ease Your Everyday’s Life
Executive Summary about Solar Battery Charger by Assaf Katzir
Solar battery charger is one of these devices that became a necessity once we have all these electric devices that we use on a daily basis. iPod, laptop, mobile phone, PDA, GPS etc’ just name it. There are portable flexible solar panels that you can place in your small bag and use them to charge your electrical devices’ batteries when you need to without being attached to any electrical grid outlet. Most solar chargers are equipped with plug kits which match to variety of electric devices. The variety of solar chargers’ sizes, shapes and uses continue to grow rapidly.
There is no usage cost when using solar battery chargers as opposed to the utility electricity chargers. No pollution released to the atmosphere when using portable solar charger and no chemicals leached into our ground water when discarded since we are using rechargeable batteries, so you contribute to keep environment clean, not to mention that you save money when you use a solar charger.
As you can see there are many benefits and advantages while using solar powered battery charger.
Article You May Be Interested In Reading: Solar Heater
Executive Summary about Solar Fountain by Jeff Snyder
A water feature can be relaxing. For those of us that want the stress reducing and atmosphere enhancing benefits of flowing water without the expense and hassle, a free-standing solar water fountain just may be the answer.
Solar fountains are similar to standard fountains in look and function, except the power to run them comes from a solar panel instead of an electrical outlet. The solar panel converts sunlight into electricity, which in turn powers the pump that circulates water through the fountain. This means that most solar fountains available today require direct sunlight to operate.
For one thing, solar fountains are relatively inexpensive. So go ahead and give solar fountains a try.
Solar Fountain Pumps
Executive Summary about Solar Fountain by Christine Douglas
If you want a beautiful water feature in your yard, you’ll need power of some kind. There are many reasons you may choose to use solar fountain pumps. There are many different kinds of solar fountain pumps. The first kind is an all-inclusive fountain with solar power built right in. You simply place the fountain in an area that gets ample sunlight, and enjoy! From bird baths, to cherubs, these fountains are lovely and a great use of the sun.
Other types of solar fountain pumps are for larger water features. Larger solar powered fountain pumps are available in many sizes and styles. If you choose to use a solar fountain pump, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. The fountain can be in the shade if desired, as long as the solar collector is in the sun most of the day.
Check out my other guide on Charger Solar
