fairfolio
Saved Projects

Nonplanar Solar Panels to Increase Surface Area and Efficiency

CSEF · 2023 Alternative Energy Fourth Award

Badalyan Naira · 8

Overview

As renewable energy becomes increasingly important to humanity and our planet, and also becomes more widespread and available, some technologies are gaining prevalence. In the desert environment of Southern California, many people put solar panels on their rooftops in an effort to gain as much power as possible, and for this you need a large surface area on which to put many solar cells. However, many rooftops do not have this much area. In addition, for flat panels, no part of the panel is always facing the sun directly. This project is meant to solve that problem by conceptualizing and testing a technique in which solar panels are placed in non-planar configurations that allow more energy to be produced per unit footprint and that allow the sun’s rays to hit at least part of the solar panel directly at any time of day. In addition, this technique allows one to “pack” more surface area into a smaller footprint. The configuration was spherical in order to have sun rays always directly hit at least part of the panel. Because manufacturing curved solar panels is still an emerging technology, the configurations were approximated with flat solar cells. Measuring current every hour proved that the spherical configuration produces more current than the flat one, even though the experiment used the same amount of solar cells on each panel and the surface area benefit was not used. This is because the spherical panel works better when the sun is angled, which it is for the majority of the day.

Source coverage

This record comes from a published award list, not a complete project archive. Its abstract comes from CSEF's public project showcase as archived by the Internet Archive before judging (https://web.archive.org/web/20230401224130/https://ca-csef.zfairs.com/showcase/ShowcaseInfo?f=838e60b7-ea75-46e8-865c-fde4864244b3); the version presented may differ.

Awards (1)

Competition history

  • CSEF 2023 Alternative Energy · Entry J0207

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google