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Residential and Commercial Hot Water Division - Technology
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University of Chicago Physics Professor Receives Solar Personality of the Year Award
[March 8 2000] Roland Winston, Professor in Physics at the University of Chicago, will receive the First Solar Personality of the Year Award at 2:30 p.m. Friday, March 10, at the University’s Enrico Fermi Institute for his outstanding contributions to research, development, education and leadership in solar energy during the past 36 years.
Traveling from Bangalore, India, to Chicago to make the presentation will be Chandy Mathew, director of Unison Technologies Ltd. Unison sponsored the Solar Millennium Expo & Seminars, the first event of its kind in India devoted to the holistic promotion of the applications of solar-energy technologies, where Winston was announced as the First Solar Personality of the Year last October. The award is sponsored by the Industrial Credit and Investment Corporation of India to commemorate the event, which will be held annually.
Winston was nominated for the award by a jury of leading representatives from the International Solar Energy Society and the Solar Energy Society of India. Professor Winston's holistic mission continues to bring path-breaking and catalytic benefits to the development of technologies and applications in the field of solar energy the world over, the jurors wrote in their citation. He is the most appropriate awardee of the first ICICI Solar Personality of the Year Award for the year 1999.”
The jury cited Winston for his leadership in research that spans solar-energy collection, non-imaging optics and experimental high-energy physics. Winston has led research groups in solar energy at Argonne National Laboratory and at the University of Chicago. He holds 30 patents on non-imaging radiant energy concentration and illumination. He also is the author of more than 150 publications and co-author of two definitive books on non-imaging optics.
Non-imaging optics serve as light funnels that collect and intensify radiation far better than do lenses and mirrors. They also collect light from a large section of sky, so they require no moving parts, unlike conventional solar arrays.
The technique serves as the foundation for a new solar-energy technology, developed over the last 25 years by Winston and Chicago colleague Joseph O’Gallagher, that produces the highest intensity of sunlight anywhere in the solar system, the surface of the sun included. The technology now is being developed commercially by Solargenix Energy of Raleigh, NC.
Winston and O’Gallagher’s non-imaging optics also have been used in scientific instruments such as the Cosmic Background Explorer satellite to study infrared and microwave radiation from the early universe.
Winston served on the board of directors of the American Solar Energy Society from 1987 to 1992 and of the International Solar Energy Society from 1991 to 1994.
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