A concept paper published in ACS Photonics, describes a photovoltaic cell that works at night.
According Jeremy Munday, one of the paper's authors and a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC Davis
a specially designed photovoltaic cell could generate up to 50 watts of power per square meter under ideal conditions at night, about a quarter of what a conventional solar panel can generate in daytime
The described cell is thermoradiative and emits infrared radiation to space, which has a much lower than Earth temperature of 2.73 Kelvin.
"A regular solar cell generates power by absorbing sunlight, which causes a voltage to appear across the device and for current to flow. In these new devices, light is instead emitted and the current and voltage go in the opposite direction, but you still generate power," Munday said. "You have to use different materials, but the physics is the same."
The device would work during the day as well, if you took steps to either block direct sunlight or pointed it away from the sun. Because this new type of solar cell could potentially operate around the clock, it is an intriguing option to balance the power grid over the day-night cycle.
Journal Reference: [Nighttime Photovoltaic Cells: Electrical Power Generation by Optically Coupling with Deep Space, ACS Photonics (DOI: 10.1021/acsphotonics.9b00679)
(Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday February 02 2020, @03:34PM (1 child)
It sounds like a good fit, spacecraft already have to radiate heat anyway so getting power from doing so could make sense.
I thought about the feasibility of making two sided arrays and flipping them for daytime vs nighttime use on Earth. Same general idea, although I wouldn't want a bunch of flipping/shuffling panels on my roof, however it might work for industrial sized solar farms.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by Coward, Anonymous on Sunday February 02 2020, @04:11PM
Yay, let's add thermal resistance to the dissipation path! Engineers are going to love that.