Thesis Defense: Modeling Radiation Transport in Biomimetic Configuration of Solar Cells for Enhanced Sunlight Capture Using the Monte Carlo Method.

Committee:

• Sandip Mazumder, Chair (ME)
• Mark Walter (ME)

Summary:

Solar photovoltaic cells arranged in complex three-dimensional leaf-like configurations—referred to as a solar tree—can potentially collect more sunlight than traditionally used flat configurations. It is hypothesized that this could be because of two reasons. First, the three-dimensional space can be utilized to increase the overall surface area over which the sunlight may be captured. Second, as opposed to traditional flat panel configurations where the capture efficiency decreases dramatically for shallow angles of incidence, the capture efficiency of a solar tree is hampered little by shallow angles of incidence due to the three-dimensional orientation of the solar leaves. In order to test these hypotheses, high fidelity Monte Carlo simulation of solar radiation transport has been conducted. The Monte Carlo simulations provide local radiation flux distributions in addition to global radiation flux summaries. The effects of several geometric parameters, namely the capture area of the solar cells (number of leaves), the tilt angle of leaves and the angle of solar irradiation, which influence the performance of the proposed solar tree have been studied systematically and compared to the performance of the flat panel configuration.The Monte Carlo results have also been interpolated to construct a daily sunlight capture profile both for mid-winter and mid-summer for five cities representative of the entire latitude range of cities in the United States.