IBM Sunflower (Welcome to the Thunder Dome II (part two)

IBM and Airlight team up to develop the Sunflower. HCPVT collector. (High Concentration Photovoltaic Thermal.)

Everything is better with a Swiss scientist to show you around, no?

I found this embedded here at Gizmag. A much better story than the others, thank goodness. The collector dish is more creative than the rest of their scheme, I think. They use a fibrous concrete for the dish. Vacuum shaped sheer sheets of metalized foils or the like for the compound primary (40 square meters!) There would need to be dynamic control of that vacuum as the atmospheric pressure changes you do not want a new focal length imposed as the weather and temperature changes....

This just in: a friend tracked down this EDN story. It is not too interested in the offboard bits (low temp implementations and balance of system stuff) but a nice juicy account of a voltage management scheme comes up late in the story, spoiler alert: something called a "Δ-converter" is important. As is putting this important voltage management gear pretty darn close to the cells. Or so it seems.

All of this is worrisome as these are the same cells that are sitting at a 2,000 suns focal point. I'm going to call this "putting all your eggs in one frying pan." Shows a whole lot of faith in the tracking and the cooling apparatus.

I also wonder which disconnections are requiring Flyback Diodes (freewheeling?) Dear readers, what do you see when you read that report. (The images on the EDN story seem to have been pulled. But the PDF still has them (download link here)