Do you remember Ryszard Dzikowski’s 3D solar panel?
I’ll refresh it for you: light enters through one of the sides, through some optical fibers, and hits the photovoltaic cells, reflecting from one to another, until most of it is absorbed and transformed into electricity.
Ryszard says it’s much more efficient to assemble solar cell this way than put them directly into light, where you’ll lose a lot through reflection back into the environment. Some recently invented anti-reflective coatings may even accelerate the light’s absorption into the solar cells. This is one of the advantages.
The other one is that you can store these 3D solar panels anywhere, and transport the light to them more flexibly, via the optical fibers, with minimum losses.
Now Ryszard is proving the real power of his innovation, by powering two electric motors at a time by having the source of energy a 12V wall lighting appliance and a two LED flashlights.
When I asked him, he even gave me the following information about the motors and the light sources:
As you may well see in the video, the motor is spinning pretty fast from such a low-consuming light source such as two LED flashlights, so the efficiency of the entire setup is not negligible at all.
Further research and measurements will be taken to prove the efficiency of this system compared to a simple, directly exposed to light solar panel. His website is here.
Until then, please write your opinion on Ryszard’s innovation in the Comments section below.
