Date: Nov 18, 2010 Author: press release Source: Company Data (
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The 1st CPV Today Awards Ceremony took place on the 18th November at the Meliá Lebreros in Seville. In its first edition, the CPV Today Awards focused on recognizing companies that have worked to take CPV to the next level - from the R&D efforts to the commercial stage.
The CPV research and innovation award will recognize the company that has dedicated enormous and continuous efforts in innovating towards the considerable improvement of CPV technology. The innovations/research projects can be focused in any area of CPV and should be feasible to integrate at the commercial level in the near future.
The finalists for this award were QuantaSol Ltd, Spire Semiconductor, Seprius and LPI. The award was presented to LPI during the 1st CPB Today Awards Ceremony held in conjunction with the 3rd Concentrated Photovoltaics Summit on November 18, 2010 in Seville. Below are comments made about LPI when it was announced as a finalist in the award category.
LPI
Light Prescriptions Innovators, LLC (LPI) is a world leader in the field of nonimaging optics. The firm provides design, prototype fabrication and mass production of optics that make a positive contribution in energy savings today. LPI specializes in state-of-the-art optical solutions to problems where the most efficient transfer of light at the lowest possible cost is the goal, such as CPV. LPI's advanced designs do not complicate the technological feasibility: in fact they facilitate it. Such was the case with the BOEING-XR700 system, or, more recently, the Fresnel Köhler (FK) concentrator, an achromatic and compact device (f-number = 1) that splits the conventional Fresnel system into 4 sectors to achieve outstanding performance features:
• High concentration with looser aiming and manufacturing tolerances
• Very high efficiency at array level (minimizing mismatch losses)
• Perfectly-uniform square irradiance on the solar cell.
Two FK prototypes have been developed thus far for two major companies, achieving outstanding results. In the case of PIRELLI, the measured performance has matched the simulations at the first try, with electrical efficiencies beyond 32% at Tcell=25ºC, and Concentration-Acceptance angle products achieving the theoretical limit for this technology (±1.26º at 576×).
