Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Solar Concentrator Video on YouTube

Jason Karp and his solar concentrator have made their way to YouTube. (Today YouTube, tomoroww???)




Want more? Read the academic paper here: http://psilab.ucsd.edu/publications.html

By the way, this is Joseph Ford's lab at the Jacobs School...birthplace of "origami optics"...and the inventor of origami optics, Jason Tremblay earned his PhD and is a postdoc in the Ford lab.



Caption: Electrical engineering Ph.D. student Jason Karp won the 2010 Rudee Research Expo Outstanding Poster Award. His winning poster: “Planar Micro-Optic Solar Concentration”.

photo credit (above): UC San Diego / Erik Jepsen

Caption: The new solar concentrator design (right) from UC San Diego collects sunlight with thousands of small lenses imprinted on a common sheet. All these lenses couple into a flat “waveguide” which funnels light to a single photovoltaic cell. Older system designs (left) require many photovoltaic cells which each need to be aligned and electrically connected.