Producing Electricity by Concentrated Solar Energy
Hassan Abdulmouti
Abstract
Energy sources are crucial for the development and growth of economies and civilizations. Solar energy is alternative energy to generate electrical power. The motivation of this paper is to examine the applicability of a solar sphere experimentally which is a new concentrated photovoltaic technology. The function of this new technology is to collect solar energy and concentrate it into a small region as a focal point. The focused solar energy can generate a massive amount of power which is used to produce more electricity than normal photovoltaic panels. The experiments are carried out for several kinds of shapes and models that have the same volume, different volumes, and different fluid mediums. The tested shapes are a full sphere, the upper semi-sphere, the bottom semi-sphere, cylinder in a horizontal and a vertical position, vertical half-cylinder, horizontal half cylinder with the upper flat surface, a horizontal half cylinder with the lower flat surface, and cube. Then, these shapes are compared with normal photovoltaics (PV) that have the same section area as these shapes. With respect to the volume and size, many different volumes are tested. The equivalent diameters are 10 cm diameter, 12 cm diameter, 14 cm diameter, and 30 cm diameter. Regarding the materials, various mediums and materials (solids, liquids, gasses) are used. The solid materials are glass, crystal, and acrylic while the liquids are oil, water, and alcohol, and the used gas is the air. Moreover, the thickness of the shape is also tested, by using 4 mm, 5 mm, 6 mm, and 8 mm acrylic thicknesses. After a comparison between different designs, the results of the experiments reveal that the full sphere with the same material produces a higher power output than other shapes, it produces around triple the power output of the semi-spheres and 4 times the power output of a PV with the same area. The best shapes that produce the highest output power are arranged from the highest output power to the lower as follows: full sphere, semi-sphere with dawn flat surface, semi-sphere with an up flat surface, horizontal half cylinder with the upper flat surface, horizontal half cylinder with the lower flat surface, vertical half-cylinder, vertical cylinder, horizontal cylinder, and cube. The results clarify that increasing the size of the sphere results in an increase in the power output. Where the 12 cm diameter sphere produces 0.8 times the power output of the 10 cm diameter sphere, and the 14 cm diameter sphere produces 0.9 times the power output of the 12 cm diameter sphere, while the 30 cm diameter sphere produces around 4 times the power output of the 12 cm diameter one. In addition, it was verified that increasing the thickness of the ball yields in increasing the output power, it is confirmed that increasing the thickness by 1 mm yields in increasing the output power by 0.8 times. The experiments show that all solid materials produce the highest power output. However, these solid materials produce high heat at the same time, so they are not desirable for generating electricity. Moreover, it was noted that the sphere filled with oil produces 1.5 times more power output than the one filled with alcohol while the sphere filled with alcohol produces double the power output of the sphere filled with water. The sphere filled with air had the lowest power output compared to the other substances.