Solar Cells for a Cloud Day

Change your buoy design so that it gets his energy from the waves and tidal currents. It will work even trough the night.

Gwen

v you neednt assmble by yourself, factory can do it for your requrement.

You mean a Chinese factory?

v

Yes I mean chinese products. size and power depend on your requiremt. and finished products like yard lamp street lamp etc.

jjatyy@sina.com

or info@ndt.cn

I have a number of items I'd like to see manufactured more inexpensively than now, but I don't cotton to the idea of factories who use-up their workers like so many slaves and throw them away when they're finally spent. It's so immoral I could just SCREAM!

-e

v

no dout there are lots of such factoried in the developing region, even in developed region exists as well. we can do nothing about it. I can only advice ourself not to do that!

Yeah, I have a self winding watch. It works by a little internal pendulum-ratchet mechanism. Its waterproof, dust proof, and works in all sorts of weather. (obsolete now in this day of digital everything of course, but the principle is the same) Bet you could figure out a way to use that. Might even work if it is frozen into the ice because even ice floes rock around a bit. Photo voltaic doesn't seem very good...too delicate....you wouldn't be able to knock the ice off it without wrecking the thing. Without ice, you still have to contend with sea weed, mussels, and such which will STILL need to be cleaned off by minimum wage workers with sea axes.

You need to store the energy from the sunny days. Use a photoelectric sensor to control the output, Much the way the solar panel yard lights work.

Gwen and others here have a point: solar is way too delicate for buoy applications. Seas can get very rough in a storm and buoys can be completely and repeatedly submerged in heavy seas (I lived on an island for six years. Remember the film "The Perfect Storm?" I was in that storm, and lemme tell you: it kicked ass big time. A solar panel would've been turned into so much lobster bait within ten minutes in that mess.)

Something you might experiment with is this: embed one or more powerful magnets in a foam plastic float, and let the captive float ride up and down inside a non-ferrous, preferably non-metallic, vertical tube by means of wave action. Make sure the top of the tube is vented. The combination of magnets with sealed, stationary coils (with respect to the buoy) surrounding the tube can serve as a generator. Rectify the power, as it will alternate in polarity in tandem the up-and-down action of the waves, and use the current to charge your batteries. This type of arrangement is actually at its best in a storm, when it is most productive, whereas a solar panel may (read will) soon get ripped off by wind and wave. And, as another poster here replied, use some sort of photocell to turn the buoy light off during the day.

The Subject of this thread emphasized Clouds. You live in Seattle? hehehe

-e

One more thought: LEDs are far more energy-efficient than incandescent lamps at the same brightness, and the LEDs can be mounted on strips inside the sealed lamp globe and only need to point sideways. Of course, the only colors you'll need are red and green...

You can also enclose the photocell inside the same globe and make it a complete, sealed assembly, sans batteries. As the photocell will also "see" the buoy's own light, you'll need to take steps to ensure its operation is not affected. One way is for the photocell to engage/disengage the circuit based on seeing darkness/light, respectively, for a sustained period of time. Street-lamp photocontrols often do this using a heated bimetallic-strip switch to turn the light on only after it has been continuously dark for awhile. Another approach is for the blinker circuit to gate the photocell input such that the cell isn't "looking" during a blink, but does at all other times. In this case the blinker circuit runs continuously - drawing only a few milliamps - but the LEDs are not powered unless it is otherwise dark.

Some ideas, for what they're worth.

-e

One more thought: if you plan to market this buoy, take into consideration that some customers may wish to deploy it above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic Circle. What this means is, depending on the actual lattitude of the buoy, it may be subject to extended periods of darkness - months at a time - during the Arctic/Anarctic night. Solar arrays won't help you here.

Or, you might wish to keep abreast of a very recent development in nanomaterials. This new technology is a kind of optoelectronic counterpart to the Light-Emitting Diode: the Dark Absorbing Diode, or DAD. There are a lot of single DADs around, especially with divorce rates the way they are and the prevalence of Slacker Moms. The best time to build an array of DADs is when Superbowl time comes around. Just get yourself a nice 2m DLP or LCD display (stay away from plasma screens, as their resolution sucks. If you don't believe me, just go into Best Buy and count the pixels on one of these. It doesn't matter what number you come up. The point is, you can count them). Anyway, get a couple of kegs, make some calls, even hire a carpark valet or two, and you're all set.

And if you like, the buoys can even bring their gulls.

-e

"take into consideration that some customers may wish to deploy it above the Arctic Circle and below the Antarctic Circle"

- and therefore the Coriolis Effect...