Recent content by jhermann

There is only one mirrow that is abutting the solar cell and angled to place as much of the reflected light as possible on the cell. The cell is placed flat on the table; it is not angled to be perpendicular to the sun light. However, no noticable difference in current is observed when the...

Thanks to everybody that has responded to this post; I think we may be on to something with the drop in effiency when temperature goes up theory. The reason we're only measuring current is that power delivered to the load (resistor) is P = I * I * R. So an increase in current indicates...

To clarify, the experiment was only performed on clear sunny days (no clouds affecting the sun light).

Thank you CMOS for your response. We are being very careful not to block any of the incident light. Being that it is November and we are located in Texas, the angle of the sun is such that we can easily place the mirrow on the table and tilt it such that light reflects on the solar cell...

My son is a 3rd grader and wanted to do a science fair project on solar cells. So we devised an experiment to see if reflecting light with a mirrow would increase power output. We constructed a circuit using an amp-meter, solar cell, and 10Kohm resistor. He hypothesized that reflecting sun...