Company: Technology Today - Solar Power: Applying Raytheon's Defense Technologies

A solar panel gets a single blast of sun. But what if you built a box of 'em & let the rays bounce inside?

The basic approach Raytheon selected to convert solar energy into electric power was HCPV, which utilizes Raytheon's patent-pending, kaleidoscope photon recycling concept, where sunlight is concentrated using a large parabolic dish reflector (12.5 meters in diameter) and guided into a closed photon-to-electricity cavity converter. The photons trapped in this converter, initially reflected from the PV cell array, are provided more than one opportunity to strike the active portion of the multi-junction cells as they are reflected around the inside of the PVCC. Other flat panel array designs offer collected photons only one opportunity to be absorbed by the multi-junction PV cells, since reflected photons from these other arrays are immediately lost. Commercially available Emcore triple-junction cells were used in making the PVCC. These off-the-shelf cells consist of indium g...

Full article: http://www.raytheon.com/technology_today/2011_i1/solar.ht...