1.1 Tethered aerostat For an aerostat to support PV devices, this has to be able to produce enough lift via its buoyancy to overcome its weight, the weight of the solar cells plus any control system and that of the tether, still leaving enough margin to produce an appropriate tension in the tether to avoid […]

The knowledge of the mean wind speed at a certain altitude (and its statistical properties) is essential to calculate the aerodynamic forces acting on the aerostat and in particular to determine the forces along the mooring cable. The wind speed data described in this section were provided by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), from […]

The first step in the development of the ASPG concept is to evaluate how much solar energy is available as a function of altitude. This allows a direct assessment of the potential of the ASPG when compared to an equivalent ground based system. This section presents a set of calculations to enable this comparison and […]

Lighter-than-air craft (aerostats) have been progressively neglected by the main stream research in Aerospace Engineering during the second half of the past century after having made remarkable technological progress that culminated in the 1930’s with the construction of over 200m long airships (Dick & Robinson, 1992, Robinson, 1973). There have been some developments of historical […]

G. S. Aglietti, S. Redi, A. R. Tatnall, T. Markvart and S. J.I. Walker University of Southampton United Kingdom 1. Introduction One of the major issues in the use of ground based photovoltaic (PV) panels for the large scale collection of solar energy is the relatively low energy density. As a result a large area […]

3.3 Changes of the device structure As can be extracted from the previous section, the coming future for the solar cells front face definition, to get an effective improvement on the energy conversion efficiency, is not only related to the use of an optimal metal grid definition, but is also related to the introduction of […]

The proposed modelling of the series resistance constitutes a powerful tool to know how industrial solar cells can evolve thanks to the improvement of metallic pastes, or new passivation processing for bulk and surface. With this purpose the modelling will be used to evaluate the efficiency of a solar cell (with an optimal H-pattern grid […]

Taking the results shown in the previous section, it is clear that solar cell performance is improved with the addition of one bus more to its front contact grid, but what happens when a bigger number of buses are added to the front grid design? Can we expect further improvement?. To answer these questions we […]