Combined Heat and Power Solar System
Background
Solar collectors have been designed differently with various desired performances for application in solar energy generation. A solar thermal collector is designed to collect heat by absorbing sunlight. A solar electric generation system is designed to generate electricity directly from sunlight using photovoltaic (PV) materials. Solar collectors may employ light concentrators to concentrate solar light onto the energy transducer for effective energy conversion, and many forms of concentrators have been developed in reaching higher concentration. Concentrators may be imaging or nonimaging. To reduce cost and increase the overall efficiency of a solar system, one promising technology is to combine heat and electric power generation.
Description
A researcher at the University of California, Merced has invented a novel non-imaging vacuum tube solar collector, which was designed normally to be used for heat generation, to directly generate both electrical energy and heat.
This innovative apparatus includes an evacuated enclosure with an inner tube as the absorber. The inner tube includes a selective surface of rigid material coated with a photovoltaic layer. The selective surface converts a portion of the incident light to heat, and the photovoltaic layer converts a portion of the incident light to electrical energy. The rigid material is a low-emittance metallic layer such as aluminum or copper. The thin-film photovoltaic layer will be selective because at the infrared wavelengths that characterize the radiation from the absorber, the solar cell layer is transparent. The result is “free electricity” to the user because the solar cell layer is expected to be low-cost, like conventional selective coatings.
Applications
The invention may become widely applied in home, commercial settings, and industry--wherever both heat and electricity are used.
Advantages
A single solar energy collector generates both thermal and electrical energy, at the cost of a thermal collector.
Inventor
Roland Winston
