Solar energy is expected to contribute a greater piece of the alternative energy pie in the following years. One way to convert solar energy to electricity is through photovoltaics. Once a prohibitive barrier, the cost of photovoltaics have begun to fall while today's photovoltaics are increasingly more efficient than their predecessors. Our work focuses on:

1. Tracking systems that follow the sun throughout the day and tilt solar panels accordingly to increase the sunshine absorbed by the solar cells, thus the efficiency of the system. Because of the weight of the panel and the precise controls needed to track the sun, these systems are more expensive than their inefficient counterparts.

2. Reducing the cost of solar panels by using concentrators such as mirrors and lenses (the shiny surface in the picture to the left) to focus the sun's rays. Concentrators increase the amount of power each solar cell generates, allowing us to use less photovoltaic material to produce the same amount of energy. And because they are made from relatively inexpensive materials such as plastic lenses and metal housings, they are significantly less expensive than covering the same area with photovoltaics.

Say you had a lens that could capture the sun's rays regardless of its angle in the sky and could concentrate that light on a surface. As the sun moved, the concentrated light point would move too. Instead of tilting the heavy solar panel to track the sun's movement, we would keep the lenses in a fixed position and move the surface on which they concentrate their light to the left or to the right as the light point moved. This kind of left-right tracking would  use simple hydraulics instead of the complex multi-dimensional systems we've been using.

Our progress so far:

What we're busy with now: