Inventions by San Diego Faculty
The UC San Diego Office of Technology Transfer is pleased to present these technologies that are currently available for licensing. For more information, contact Senior Licensing Officer Victoria Cajipe Ph.D. at (858) 822-2304 or vbcajipe@ucsd.edu.
Photovoltaics have thus far been largely based on semiconductors, e.g., Si, CdTe, and cadmium indium selenide. Solar cells using these materials have increasingly been available commercially but still need improvement relative to stability, cost, and environmental concerns. [read more]
Semiconductor nanowires have been successfully utilized as building blocks for various electronic and photonic devices. In particular, vertically aligned semiconductor nanowire arrays offer the potential of high photoconversion efficiency compared to that of thin film devices given the nanowire properties of enhanced light absorption, improved carrier collection efficiency, and reduced optical reflectance. [read more]
UC San Diego researchers have developed a method and device design for the spectral concentration of multi-wavelength light (e.g., solar energy ranging from far infrared to ultraviolet, into light of wavelengths within a narrow spectral width) and subsequent transport of the concentrated output light. [read more]
Using only the measure of output power from a solar installation, this method allows for the determination of azimuth and tilt-angle at which a panel is installed and calculation of the solar radiation received by the panel in generating the measured output power. [read more]
Through an effort to better predict the solar energy conversion of PV cells in regions of occasional cloudiness, the subject software was developed to process optically captured whole-sky images, differentiate clouds from clear sky, and correlate said cloud coverage with the productivity of nearby PV installations. [read more]
Concentrated solar power and solar hot water systems convert sunlight to thermal energy (heat) by using solar absorbers. For efficient operation, the solar absorber has to effectively absorb the solar energy without emitting much of its own blackbody radiation. [read more]
Detailed here is a sensor array intended for large (10s or 100s of MW) PV or solar thermal power plants to aid in the balance of supply and demand on an utility electric grid. [read more]
The UCSD Sky Imager is an instrument that helps in the forecasting of solar irradiance one to thirty minutes ahead of time. The instrument is built from commercially available off-the-shelf components but runs a proprietary data acquisition system. [read more]
Photoelectrochemical (PEC) cells use photons to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases and offer a promising method for hydrogen production that is directly driven by solar energy. Silicon (Si) is an attractive candidate for PEC cell application because of its moderate energy band-gap and low-cost. [read more]
