In the past couple of weeks the Spartan Superway has been preoccupied with group presentations; sub-team work time has been limited because of this. Although we have less time to work on our sub-team projects it is really good to know where all the other groups are at with their own work. It also gives us a chance to communicate with the group as a whole which is helpful; it lets us know what information we can expect from other groups as well as what information they expect and need from our own group.
Even presentations taking a good portion of our time has not stopped our own sub-team's progress though! We have members researching configurations, drafting plans for a mounting system and analyzing different solar cell arrays.
After analyzing a concave, convex, and strictly planar arrangement of cells it turns out that the curvature decreases the amount of energy produced by the cell. Very generous estimation for reflected light absorbed by the cell (about 5%) only marginally increased gains. It is better to exclude reflection from the results for a very important reason: reflected light from a cell is light energy that was lost to the cell; for this reason many modern solar panels are coated with anti reflective layer.
This makes sense, specifically when looking at the MiaSole panels we are using. They are not very reflective due to their thin-film design; a mono- or poly-crystalline panel might have more reflectivity due to its glass base though.
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