Missouri professor lights up solar panels with nantennas

William Atkins
Tuesday, 17 May 2011 22:50

Science - Energy

A University of Missouri professor of engineering has developed a solar panel that collects up to 95% of the sunlight that falls on it. Traditional solar panels absorb only about 20%, which is very inefficient. These nantennas could one day make very inexpensive solar panels.

Dr. Patrick Pinhero is an associate professor in the University of Missouri's (MU) Chemical Engineering Department, at Columbia, Missouri.

Pinhero and his MU team has developed what is called nanoantenna electromagnetic collectors (NECs), or nantennas for short.

NECs are thin, moldable, flexible sheets of small antennas that can be used within solar collectors. The solar sheet captures up to 95% of the electromagnetic spectrum that impinges on its surface.

According to the EurekAlert article New solar product captures up to 95 percent of light energy, the 'energy generated using traditional photovoltaic (PV) methods of solar collection is inefficient and neglects much of the available solar electromagnetic (sunlight) spectrum. The device his team has developed - essentially a thin, moldable sheet of small antennas called nantenna - can harvest the heat from industrial processes and convert it into usable electricity.'

And, 'Their ambition is to extend this concept to a direct solar facing nantenna device capable of collecting solar irradiation in the near infrared and optical regions of the solar spectrum.'

The MU team is working with a team at the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho Falls, Idaho (including K. K. Kotter and S. D. Novack), along with Garrett Moddel, an electrical engineering professor at the University of Colorado, and Dennis Slafer, of MicroContinuum, Inc., of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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