I hate to dampen unbridled enthusiasm but is inevitable that there will be size limits to a panel of ClearvVue glass. Consider the following:
- From what I understand of the tech the angle of the light entering the sheet will be optimal when it enters at right angles to the plane of the sheet.
- This is largely because the technology of the refracting layer has itself been designed to redirect only the UV and IR light by as close as possible to 90deg towards its edges. How it does this is the clever part of the tech, but clever as it might be it cannot be 100% effective under all conditions. It is technology not magic.
- So firstly there will be a limit to how much it can redirect the collected light towards the edges as the entry angle of the light moves away from 90deg. The tech acts to channel the light within the sandwich layer, but the further from 90deg the more the collection efficiency will be reduced. I do not know what range the angle of incidence can be before the losses become excessive, but there will be a practical limit.
- If you look at a window from any angle you will notice that it acts as a mirror. Some light is always reflected. This reflection increases with incidence angle. This portion of incident light does not enter the glass, and so cannot be harvested.
- The company info also talks about the panel having 70% transparency. That is presumably talking about 70% of visible light passing through the panel. That implies a 30% loss even of incident visible light. But it is not the visible light in this case that generates the electricity, it is only the UV and IR that is collected. In the ClearVue panel the majority of UV and IR light needs to be redirected to the edges where it generates electricity. That indicates as close as possible to 100% loss of transparency to UV and IR light is desirable.
- What is not fully appreciated by the layman is that differing proportions of light of different wavelengths are absorbed by passage through a transparent medium. Glass is transparent to visible light, unless it is brown glass or red glass etc, in which case blue light or green light is being absorbed respectively in each case. Glass is largely transparent to some portion of UV and IR light. But in any transparent medium such as glass light is absorbed increasingly in proportion to the length of the the path it travels through the medium. The longer the path length the more light is absorbed. That is why deep water looks darker than shallow. This is true of glass too. The thicker the glass the more light is absorbed and the darker the glass looks.
- But, and here is the point, visible light only passes through a few millimetres of the panel, but UV and IR light is being made to travel through a layer that is maybe half a metre long.
- Light entering the centre of a panel has a greater distance to travel to the edges. Thus the wider the panel the greater the loss of useful UV/IR light before it reaches the electricity generating elements.
- What I have not seen is what proportion of the UV and IR light gets through to the collecting elements, and how much is absorbed, refracted, and scattered (i.e. lost) on its way there. This will be a quantifiable positive value (i.e. >0) and this will also depend on the angle of the incident light.
- The wider the panel the less light can be redirected accurately onto the collector elements.
- The wider the panel the closer the incident light has to be to an optimal incident angle.
- The wider the panel the lower the light collection efficiency can be.
- Each of these considerations will pose limits on the sizes of panel that are practically useful.
- This can be compensated for practically for instance by using longer narrower panels. Building applications may have to change to make the best use of the tech.
ClearVue panels are a great idea and represent a useful technology that will find a significant place in the market. But it is not magic, and not unlimited in its scope. If you don't understand it - or worse, don't know that you don't understand enough - you are likely to overestimate its potential and value and underestimate its limitations. Anyone with a long memory will remember that the pundits promised that nuclear power would be so cheap to produce that they wouldn't even bother to meter it. Yeah, right. Here endeth the lesson!
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