Scientific Visit to Manufacturer

we visited the company on 18th november at 14:00pm.

Our scientific visit to Absolicon Company was very useful and important. A small tour in the company makes us understand a lot of information about the product manufacture of Absolicon X10.

The Absolicon X10 combines many products like (Solar thermal panel, Photovoltaic Panel, Solar Tracker, PLC/Solar Heat Controller, Support Structure) into one product to get low cost with high efficiency and easy installation.

Concerning to the X10, It uses Double Solar Technology™ (DST) which is a technology that has been developed and perfected by Absolicon since 2002.

Simply the idea behind the DST is to combine a Photovoltaic and Thermal Concentrator (CPVT) into one product,

How it works

The sun’s rays hit the solar collector that focuses and thereby concentrates the sunlight ten times on the receiver in the middle of the collector. On the outside of the receiver, special Photovoltaic cells are mounted that can withstand high concentration. The Photovoltaic cells in turn heat up, and in order to keep the cells at optimal production temperatures, the system adjusts the flow of the fluid inside the receiver to cool off the cells, thus producing both electricity and thermal heat.

They have an environment problem which that they dont test their products in some seasons in Sweden that the sun dose not shine, so it is a good reason to build an artificial sun simulator to test and to reduce cost of shipment to test their product in sunny places.

The Company manager was very nice person which welcome us a lot and encourage us to continue our work and to find new ideas that’s help us to build compacq artificial sun simulator, and he gave us some idea about what should be our work.

Experience from the Company:

Looking for Artificial Sun simulator that gives the spectrum of sun and the intensity 20 times to that of sun. This is very useful for finishing the concentrated solar cell simulation with out waiting for sun radiation.

Artificial Sun simulator:

This equipment consists of light sources made of halogen or xenon or argon etc, whose output has the sun spectra,

The other major part of the setup is power supply, which must have the feedback(photo detector) that gives constant output.

Heart of the setup:

Here the complex part comes that is, we need to built a carriage in between the solarcell and light sources.

The work of this carriage(that holds electronic circuit) is to take care of the homogenity on solar cell to avoid the ageing problem of the lights in thir operation. Carriage must take care of the intensity coming from the light to give the solar cell a constant output, so that the simulation goes perfect on every inch of the soalar cell.

The arrangement for artificial sun simulator can be possible in 3 levels, carriage in second level in between light source which is mounted on solar cell. This carriage must move all over the solar cell set and detect the light coming from the source and gives the feedback to powersupply and the light setup in order to get the constant output from solar cell when simulates.

First Stage of our project

As we mentioned in our earlier post that the lamp is the major or heart of the design,we search on different available sources of light required to our design.

we are looking on light sources that is cheap as well as best in terms of spectral distribution.we found Iwaski Xenon arc Lamp having the spectral density same that of the sun's spectra and the cost is almost cheap.




Next we switched to reflectors:

Here we found the ellipse shaped reflector which could be used in our project.

References:
http://www.edmundoptics.com/onlinecatalog/displayproduct.cfm?productID=1412
http://www.soslightbulbs.com/uxl75xe-ushio-xenon-lamp.aspx

Literature Survey on Sun Simulators

We started investigating on available artificial sun simulators, the following information has got from the survey.

Construction of Sun simulator:
1.Lamp
This Lamp must contain the spectra close to that of sun, and
Intensity much higher than natural sun.
2.Reflector:
The arrangement of reflector must be in the form of ellipse in order to concentrate the beam of light at the focal point.
3.Power Sources:
Power supply must have the stable output, which is possible with the help of photo detector in feedback.

This is just a start of our project Sun Simulators for concentrated solar cells

Introduction to Solar cells

solar cells are used for the generation of electrical energy i.e voltage by using photon energy from sun according to the principle called photovoltaic effect. These cells are also used for generating heat energy.

Solar cells are generally made of semiconducting materials such as silicon, galliumarsanide(GaAs) etc.
we need an impure silicon solar cell for the conversion of light to voltage, in order to have the structural imbalance. This imbalance leads to stable bonding with the result of giving output as a electrical parameter, this is explained clearly in below fig. below.

But our interest is not on working of solar cell but on a device that works like natural sun


Reference:
http://science.howstuffworks.com/solar-cell6.htm

who are we

We are the students from mid-sweden university in sundsvall studying international maters program in electronic design and sensor technology,

We
1.Atamian Hagop
2.Bejugam Santosh Kumar
3.Khalid makeen
4.Mohammad Haja Shariff

are working on a Applied sensor technology project i.e. Sun simulator for concentrated solar cell under the supervision of Hailu Metaferia.