Please discuss here all your remarks and pose your questions about all racing series, except Formula One. Both technical and other questions about GP2, Touring cars, IRL, LMS, ...
Well since there isn't a particular thread, let's give this one a go.
Yesterday, the Belgian Umicore team presented their new car after the last one crashed during the 2010 edition.
The new car features a new concentratorsystem to catch more energy from sunlight and adds parabolic mirrors for the same purpose. It is apparently one of the first times this system is used.
The "Umicore Imagine" will be driven by Vanina Ickx, daughter of Jacky Ickx and regular Le Mans competitor.
It looks like they are hedging their bets on the concentrators by building a backup silicon solar array top shell on their car.
The concentrator system is especially interesting for two reasons. First, the servo-powered concentrators were done by University of Michigan in 2007, and there is a rumor that they used more energy than they produced. Also, the team is sponsored by Umicore, a company that makes a lot of money in the multijuction III-V solar cell supply chain. The company probably strong-armed them into making concetrators because concentrators are the best terrestrial application of multijuction III-V solar cells.
Overall, the concentrator isn't the best design decision, as it limits the team to 3 m^2 of solar cells and is pretty unproven in comparison to flat laminated solar cells on so many solar challenge cars over the years. I'm with the Stanford Solar Car Project, and we definitely thought about concentrators, but scrapped to idea when we realized that we could half our frontal area with some clever aerodynamic and composite tricks...
I agree I don't think the concentrators are a great idea on a mobile platform. If it were me I wouldn't want the weight hit complexity and development time for them.
http://www.solarteam.be/2011/umicar-ima ... t-atomium/
