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13-Year-Old Makes A Solar Breakthrough With Fibonacci Sequence

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markwj

Asia Pacific
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Apr 10, 2011
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Stumbled across this one:

13-Year-Old Makes A Solar Breakthrough With Fibonacci Sequence : TreeHugger

His hunch: "I knew that branches and leaves collected sunlight for photosynthesis, so my next experiments investigated if the Fibonacci pattern helped."

One thing led to another, and before you know it, this kid, three years from being eligible for a driver's license, had built a tree-like stand affixed with small solar panels in the Fibonacci pattern. He compared its ability to collect sunlight to a flat-panel collector. And Nature won.
 
I see a little problem with his method. He has his experiment setup next to a reflective surface which can't be utilized by the flat panels directed away from the reflective surface. Great experiment for a 13 year old though!

It is a great experiment. However, I have doubts about mounting for a large scale array. A tracking system would work as well, but is fairly expensive to implement.
 
He tested in different locations so that isn't a problem. His problem is linking a higher voltage to a proportionally higher power output. He needs to connect a resister and measure the power generated in each alignment. At maximum power generation, the panel will actually have lower voltages. I do think that this idea has promise though.
 

So, the reason the kid's approach doesn't work is that current solar tech requires the cells to be combined in series, and the output is governed by the worse performing cell? The kid / nature has just summed up each cell output. Trees don't suffer from this as each leaf (sic) is independent?

Sounds like they are primarily debunking the current practical ability to extract power from this arrangement, not the arrangement itself.

Another variant of the multiple-micro-inverter vs one-big-inverter battle?
 
I keep wondering if there's some way to pull the current out of solar panels and use it to directly charge my Tesla battery, rather than worrying about series voltages, boosting to 240 V, then rectifying from AC back to DC, etc. I suppose that any cell must see a higher potential in order for the current to flow into the cell, but perhaps there's a way to use boost rectification to build higher voltages than the individual solar cells produce on their own.
 
Am I the only one who sees the obvious problem? Unless I'm mistaken his "solar tree" is using a greater number of cells than his flat panel. I'm counting 17 cells on his "tree" compared to only 10 on the flat panel. Great effort but a bad experiment that proves nothing, and does not promote or teach good science.