IBM - Welcome to the Thunder Dome II

I've been meaning to discuss and size up the IBM hybrid attempt. I saw their cell/module cooling device for large high concentration dishes awhile back. take a look:

 

Illustration from a Whitepaper on the IBM Sunflower (hybrid CPVT)

What do you see? you see water inlets and outlets for a mission critical back side cooling array. That is the left/bottom side plumbing bits. We cannot see the very smart way they put a high flow highly conductive network for flowing very close to the back of the cells (the 9 dark squares) For size you can see the thermocouple plugs (grey with two different sized and colored blades) they are about a half inch wide (just checked, .66 inches or 17 mm which means those cells are 10mm/10mm.


This needs to be really heat hardy as the cells are supposed to be exposed to some 2000 suns. The paper (or some-other source, they are starting to run-together, sorry) says they are backside conductor cells. Those black faces, unlined by traditional front-side conductors, are confirmation of that.

The two thermocouples are there to monitor the coolant temperature before and after to regulate the flow of coolant. This of course means they have the traditional tradeoff issues that I am trying to avoid with frequency splitting. If the temp goes up the voltage goes down and the electric yield drops. So they are stuck with a lot of very warm water as a product. The good news is they have a vision of this as a very large device and some ideas about what to do with the warm water. More on that in the next post.

I saw some confused notions about using this for boiling water for desalination. The description in that story is pretty vague and has a real units of measure problem. Maybe a deadline pressure meets domain knowledge weakness caused it. Anyhow, further looking shows they have a reverse osmosis scheme (in separate equipment) that uses pressure rather than brute force boiling (which is why reverse osmosis and the related technologies are being explored in general: less energy intensive.) The cooling circuit needs to be closed to keep the high purity and reliability going behind the cells.

We'll look at the collector's reflector array next time.