November 18, 2010  LPI receives the CPV Research and Innovation Award at the 1st CPV Today Awards.

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×).

November 18, 2010  Dr. Juan Carlos Miñano receives the Special Achievement Award in the 1st CPV Today Awards

The 1st CPV Today Awards Ceremony was held on November 18th at the Meliá Lebreros in Seville. In its first edition, the CPV Today Awards will focus on recognizing companies and individuals that have worked towards taking CPV to the next level - from the R&D efforts to the commercial stage.

The finalists for this award were Dr. Kenji Araki, of Daido Steel, Co (Japan) Dr. Tom Tibbits of QuantaSol Ltd (United Kingdom) and Prof. Juan Carlos Miñano of Polytechnic University of Madrid (Spain).

The award was given to Prof. Miñano during the Awards Ceremony held in conjunction with the 3rd Concentrated Photovoltaics Summit which was held November 18, 2010 in Seville. The following are comments which were made in the announcement of Prof. Miñano as a finalist.

Prof. Juan Carlos Miñano has been involved in CPV since 1982, when he started his PhD activities. Since then, he has been working in all the different concentration strategies of CPV; from static concentration with silicon cells, up to High Concentration PV with multi-junction cells.

Prof. Miñano has acquired a deep insight in the field, particularly in Nonimaging Optics for CPV. He has developed several optical design techniques with immediate application to CPV, being the most well known of them the so called the Simultaneous Multiple Surface (SMS) design method. Miñano has published more than 50 journal papers, 100 congress presentations and several dozens of patents, most of them directly related with CPV.

Since 1997 he is Professor at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and since 2000 he also collaborates with LPI, Inc. as Senior Scientist. Earlier this year he was honored with the A.E. Conrady Award (2010) given by SPIE "in recognition of his exceptional contributions in developing new design methods and devices in Nonimaging Optics"

June 16, 2010  LPI solution to IODC challenge obtains the best results

I t was simply a challenge perfect for the scientists at LPI: "Transfer the maximum monochromatic flux from a 1mm square Lambertian source onto a target that has an area of 4mm but is in the shape of a 16:9 ratio rectangle.": Click here for the detail of the problem.

The problem was a tradition of the International Optical Design Conference or IODC. This 105 year old conference occurs every 4 years providing optical scientists and engineers from around the world an opportunity to meet in a structured yet informal setting. Each time the conference is planned, a problem is offered in advance. Scientists from around the world can present their solutions to the problem during one of the conference sessions. This year the conference was held in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA on June 16, 2010.

LPI Scientists are leaders in the field of non-imaging optics. Their designs and patented design methods are respected the world over. LPI Associate Scientist, Pablo Benitez and his PhD student Wang Lin decided to take up the challenge. The solution they presented was impressive. It implemented several state-of-the-art patented LPI technologies: SMS 2D XX optics, free-form grooved mirrors, and SMS 3D free-form microlens array optics with etendue-squeezing. One presenter commented that the etendue squeezing microlens was a “wonderful device” and the solution “combines some of the state-of-the-art work being done in nonimaging optics.

Click here to see the slide presentation.
LPI, Europe

April 4, 2010  LPI-Europe scientists publish technical paper in Optics Express

Leading scientists at LPI’s Spanish subsidiary in Madrid have published a new paper presenting an advanced and patent pending Concentrated Photovoltaic (CPV) design called the LPI Fresnel- Köhler. The design is comprised of a four-quadrant Fresnel primary lens and a four-node secondary refractive element. The article is published in the latest issue of Optics Express, a peer-reviewed rapid-publication scientific, electronic journal published by the Optical Society of America. One task in achieving a competitive edge in the mass production of concentrated photovoltaics is to incorporate a sufficiently large Tolerance Budget. This optical budget can be used to compensate for system tracker errors, allow for optics manufacturing sloppiness, misalignments and other imperfections of the assembly process or simply to relax these tolerances making the manufacturing process more economical. In their article, the authors detail their development of the optical device and cover its attributes and advantages.

For more information or to read the technical paper here
LPI Europe

March 30, 2010  LPI-designed XR700 HCPV Solar Power Technology Moves Into Commercialization Phase

The Boeing Company and Stirling Energy Systems have formed a strategic partnership to complete the commercialization and deployment of Boeing's XR700 high-concentration photovoltaic (HCPV) solar power technology. The key component of the XR700 is the Off-Axis optics used in the system. Through a licensing agreement with Boeing, Stirling has acquired the sole rights to develop, manufacture and deploy the HCPV product globally. Boeing began developing the XR700 technology in 2007 with LPI designing the optics used in the system. The project was in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Program. The technology development phase is expected to continue for the next two years before achieving commercial-scale deployment in 2012. Click here for more
LPI, LLC