The Power of Design: Product Innovation in Sustainable Energy Technologies by Brezet Han

Author:Brezet, Han...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-05-31T00:17:11.506000+00:00

3.3 Photovoltaics and Product Integration

Angèle Reinders1 and Wilfried van Sark2

1Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, Design for Sustainability, Landbergstraat 15, The Netherlands

2Utrecht University, Faculty of Science, Science, Technology and Society (STS), Budapestlaan 6, The Netherlands

3.3.1 Introduction

It was more than a century since the discovery of the photovoltaic (PV) effect – the conversion of photons to electricity – by Becquerel in 1839 (Becquerel, 1839) before solar cells were developed. In the 1950s, PV solar cells were developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States with the purpose to apply them in products that lacked permanent electricity supply from the mains (Chapin, Fuller, and Pearson, 1954). The solar cells were called silicon solar energy converters, commonly known as the Bell Solar Battery (Prince, 1955). Furnas (1957) reports,

“The Bell Telephone Laboratories have recently applied their findings in the transistor art to making a photovoltaic cell for power purposes...and exposed to the sun, a potential of a few volts is obtained and the electrical energy so produced can be used directly or stored up in a conventional storage battery....The Bell System is now experimenting with these devices for supplying current for telephone repeaters in a test circuit in Georgia. As to cost, one radio company has produced a power pack using this type of photoelectric cell for one of its small transistorized radios.”

The Journal of the Franklin Institute mentioned as early as 1955 that “these (solar) batteries can be used as power supplies for low-power portable radio and similar equipment” (Anonymous, 1955). Expectations regarding the applicability of photovoltaic cells in products were high; Sillcox (1955) reports on predictions by researchers of New York University “that small household appliances like toasters, heaters or mixers using the sun's energy might be in fairly widespread use within the next five years (i.e., 1960).” These predictions have not become reality, because at that time the costs of silicon PV cells were about $200 per Watt for high-efficiency cells (Prince, 1959) – where 12% was considered high efficiency – and the costs of a dry cell to operate a radio for about 100 hours would be less than a dollar (Furnas, 1957). Therefore, it was believed that the solar battery could be an economical source for all except the most special purposes. As such by the end of the 1950s silicon PV solar cells were applied as a power supply for satellites (Zahl and Ziegler, 1960). The Vanguard TV-4 test satellite that launched on March, 17 1960 was the first satellite ever equipped with a solar-powered system and it announced a new area of space technology with solar-powered satellites.

At present, various applications of photovoltaic solar cells exist ranging from stand-alone PV systems, satellites, grid-connected PV, building integrated PV systems, and a very large system with a power of tens of megawatts. The focus of this chapter, however, is on product-integrated PV (PIPV) from the perspective of industrial design engineering. PIPV can be applied in consumer products, lighting products, boats, vehicles, business-to-business applications, and arts (Reinders and van Sark, 2012).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.