Flat solar photovoltaic panels are becoming more widespread, but the power they produce varies over the course of the day as the sun’s position changes — unless the panels are mounted on tracking systems to keep them pointed sunward, which adds complexity and expense.
Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was inspired by the way trees spread their leaves to capture sunlight and wondered if a three-dimensional shape covered in solar cells would be more efficient than a flat panel. He worked with a UROP student, Marco Bernardi, to create a computer program that starts with basic shapes and lets them evolve, changing slightly each time and selecting those that perform best to start the next generation, he found that such systems could produce relatively constant power throughout the day without the need for tracking, and produce significantly more power overall — up to two and a half times as much as a flat array. He is continuing to work on finding the best shapes and building a prototype system, and figures that solar panels based on this concept could be shipped flat and then unfolded at the site to their complex shapes.
The images in the slide show produced by Jeffry Crossman and Bryan Myers for MIT visualize some of the varied shapes with improved efficiency that emerged from the evolving simulation.
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