A professor and research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that has discovered a dramatic new way to build better Concentrated Solar Power towers is looking for partner companies to test their discovery in the field.

Alexander Mitsos, the Rockwell International assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, found with his team that arranging the mirrors around a CSP tower like the florets in the center of a sunflower reduce the space a tower takes up and increases efficiency.

CSP is a highly effective power generation tool, but is rarely used because it requires such a large amount of open land, Mitsos said.

“We’d been working on solar thermal efficiencies,” Mitsos said. “We came up with a new arrangement for the mirrors.”

He said the team realized at one point that its most efficient design looked a bit like a spiral. The researchers began thinking more critically about spirals and landed on the sunflower. All of the flower’s florets, which mature into seeds, spiral toward the center at 137-degree angles. Drawing inspiration from the sunflower, the team developed a so-called Fermat spiral with the mirrors woven around the tower at 137-degree angles to each other.

The Fermat Spiral works in nature. The researchers found that it also works in solar.

“We discovered that you can increase the efficiency by 5 percent and reduce the land it takes up by 15 percent,” Mitsos said. “That’s if you want to do both. If you aren’t concerned with efficiency gains, you can reduce the footprint by 20 percent.”

The discovery, which Mitsos’ team published in the scientific journal Solar Energy, makes CSP a more viable solar option.

“Next, we want to prove it’s better,” Mitsos said. “We know it’s better, but we want to find partners who are willing to try it out in the field.”

He said he’s talking with several companies interested in experimenting with the innovative new discovery.

Pictured: Obviously, this is not MIT's prototype. If anyone has a picture of the technology, let us know.