I know that solar panels get there energy from the sun, but is it just from its heat? Many other things give off heat, like a heat lamp. I put a solar powered light i found up to a heat lamp for a minute and it had energy to produce light for a long time. I don’t know what else it could be, just want to know for sure.
Thanks in advance.
Oh — well in this case I’m talking about solar panels that produce electricity.
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There are a couple of different kinds.
Some solar panels produce electricity. Others contain a fluid that’s run through pipes to help heat the house.
Solar panels use light energy (photons) from the sun to generate electricity through the photovoltaic effect.
Not exactly. It depends on photons (light particles) to produce energy via the photovoltaic effect. The panel uses the electrons generated by the interactions with photons (from the sun or an artificial light) to create sufficient electric current to power the solar light.
You can read a little more about it here.
http://www.ehow.com/about_5098013_photovoltaic-effect.html
It just happens that whatever your source is that’s generating all these photons usually generates heat as well.
The sun actually produces little energy in the form of heat (infrared), most of it is in the form of visible light. When it hist an object the light is absorbed and then re-emitted as lower frequency radiation, infrared.
Solar panels can use the light energy to heat a fluid of some sort, but then this heat would be used to warm up something, and only a very complicated and inefficient system could then use that heat to produce electricity. Most likely what you had was a solar cell, which uses the photoelectric effect to directly convert light to electricity (the explanation on how this could happen is what got Einstein the Nobel prize in physics in 1905; he did not get it for the Theory of Relativity).
Its not exactly the heat as it seems to be…u can say its the light energy..solar panels are usually semi-conductor devices which utilize photo-electric effect to produce electricity…hence they are also called Photo-voltaic cells (Photo-light Voltaic-voltage). The amount of electricity depends on the wavelength and intensity of the light used and some other factors as well like geometry etc.
The heat lamp energized the solar panel as it emitted light with significant intensity….but a heating source with no light emission will have no effect on the solar panel.
Solar electric panels (photovoltaics) use the light of the sun to produce electricity. Heat actually lowers their efficiency and causes them to produce less electricity.