IBM applies cooling technology chips to solar cells
IBM will use one of its processor cooling techniques to keep the temperature of solar cells within limits. The technology should produce more efficient and cheaper solar cells.
In order to increase the energy yield of solar cells, the sunlight is concentrated in many cells using optical elements. When the concentration of light in such ‘concentrated photovoltaic cells’, or CPVs, reaches a level comparable to the intensity of hundreds of suns, the temperature inside solar cells can rise rapidly. Concentrated sunlight from Fresnel lenses can heat up a solar cell enough to melt metal, which necessitates proper cooling of the CPVs. However, such cooling contributes to higher costs for solar panels, reason for IBM to investigate whether this could not be done in a better way.
The company has a prototype solar panel for this purpose built that concentrates the sunlight and heats the solar cells, if uncooled, to over sixteen hundred degrees Celsius. IBM then used a cooling method that it also uses in chips to reduce the temperature to about eighty-five degrees. The cooling uses liquid metal that transfers the heat from the solar cell to a cooling block, similar to the technology that the Nanocoolers company wanted to use for its processors a few years ago. The technique should enable cheaper cooling for high-yield solar cells, although IBM does not intend to produce the cooling or the solar cells itself. Instead, it hopes to license its technology to manufacturers.
In addition to cooling, ‘Big Blue’ also wants to use its expertise in the field of chip production to make the production process of cigs photovoltaic cells faster and cheaper: to this end, the company is developing an alternative to the usual process in which the necessary components are evaporated onto the substrate. . The company is also working on a method of applying silicon-based photocells to a glass substrate and, of course, the researchers at the research labs are striving for better efficiency in converting light into energy, whereby nanomaterials such as nanotubes can be used.