Solar panels that work without the sun; create plates that also produce energy at night

One way to produce environmentally friendly energy is through solar panels, however, as the name suggests, they can only get energy from the sun, making clear their production limitations during the night, which is why a researcher at Stanford University works to make the panels also work under the stars.

Sid Assawaworrarit, together with a team of engineers, managed to ensure that photovoltaic panels can continue to produce energy regardless of the fact that the sun is not there, that is, during the night. This was thanks to a thermoelectric generator.

With this advance they hope that all the current solar panels can be replaced, so that energy is generated 24 hours a day and during the night they will not only become electricity suppliers.

The panels, in order to supply energy, they need batteries that store everything they captured during the day. However, those batteries have an expiration date, and when they run out they must be replaced with new ones. On the other hand, the panels devised by Assawaworrarit do not require such batteries, therefore they will also help to solve this waste problem.

The plate, as it continues to produce energy during the night, no longer needs batteries. During the tests, the Stanford engineering team took advantage of California's clear and well-weather nights to test their research. In these conditions they found that they can convert infrared light that spreads through the air into electricity.

They also used a thermoelectric generator together with a conventional photovoltaic panel, to be able to vary the temperature of the panel surface influenced by the environment. They also took the opportunity to differentiate the temperature of the solar panel with that of the air and make it absorbed by the plate to convert it into electricity. Solar panels usually use silicon.

After their tests, they recorded that with these panels, 50 milliwatts per square meter of solar panel could be generated during the night. However, Assawaworrarit and his team agreed that optical conditions could eventually generate more energy.

Although the amount of energy it produces is less than that of a solar panel working during the day, which is between 250 W and 300 W, several uses can be given to these panels. For example, it could power environmental sensors and thereby extend the life of the board, since its objectives are not to include a battery that needs to be replaced.

This study is not the first to look for an option to continue producing energy even if there is no sunlight, as other scientists at the University of California pointed out in past years that they had been able to carry out the same experiment.

Unlike the Stanford researchers, they used a Thermoraditive Cell, which they said is capable of generating electricity through radiative cooling, where infrared or heat radiation leaves the cell and produces energy.

Those thermoraditive cells, they were being tested. Unlike the other square, this one takes advantage of the cold night sky to carry out the process of obtaining energy. “In these new devices, light is emitted and current and voltage go in the opposite direction, but it still generates energy,” Jeremy Munday said in Science Alert.

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