How Rainbows Could Boost Your Roof’s Solar Power
The solar panels on your roof are not perfect machines.
They are made up of individual solar cells, where the sunlight is converted to electricity, but there is inevitably a little bit of space between each cell—more or less wasted real estate. So what if you could take the light hitting that dead space and repurpose it to produce more energy? And, even cooler, what if you could do it using rainbows?
Researchers at the University of Arizona have created a holographic system designed to reduce some of the lost efficiency in solar panels due to those blank spots between the cells. A holographic light collector is inserted into the solar panel just over the dead space; the sunlight passes through this collector and splits into its ROYGBIV colors (because only certain wavelengths of light are of most use to a solar cell, in this particular case those producing yellow to red light). The useful colors are then bounced back up and off the glass covering the panel, and down into the solar cell itself.