Seconds?
This is the second article I have read today which focuses on efforts to replace expensive platinum-esque materials. The other didn't make me hungry, though. It makes me wonder what the inspiration for using shrunken shrimp shells was.
Wrap your laughing gear around this: researchers from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) have discovered that materials from shrimp/prawns can replace expensive elements in solar cells. The boffins working on nano-structured solar cells found that chitin and chitosan can make the quantum dots that are coated onto …
This is the second article I have read today which focuses on efforts to replace expensive platinum-esque materials. The other didn't make me hungry, though. It makes me wonder what the inspiration for using shrunken shrimp shells was.
Chitin and chitosan like many such exoskeletal elements (and like our own surface skin) are layered on the nanoscale. So I imagine that when you carbonise them that layering is retained and that this is beneficial for a quantum dot. I don't pretend to the physics to know if this is true but as a biologist I do have a passing knowledge of the structures of such things.
I also imagine that being able to pull a ready made scaffold like that out of a natural discard material to be much, much cheaper than trying to manufacture such a thing.
"bicycles will outrun formula one cars and pigs will fly."
Nearly there with the first part...
Now to work on the porcine aviation part...
Thing is, you don't even need to improve efficiency (and therefore power-per-square-m) that much if you're getting mega cost savings. There aren't any details on the article, but high-end efficiencies are currently around 30-35% in commercially available panels and 40%+ in new experimental ones.
If you can make a chitin solar panel with 5-10% efficiency but at a tenth of the cost, you're still ahead in power-per-unit-cost, which is far more important for large-scale applications than absolute efficiency
@James Micallef
True if you have cheap low efficiency cells you can use more, but that also means you need more panels for the same power, which means more mounting space, hardware and labour cost. Which admittedly may not be a problem in some countries but the likes of the UK where houses are small, land is limited and labour expensive it maybe more cost effective to have more efficient panels.
I used to know some people, who worked in Hawai'i, who worked on the jaw closing muscle of the lobster. Just the jaw closing muscle. The rest of the lobsters was not utilised and so could be utilised for other purposes since the lobsters did not survive the process.
During my PhD we had a Chinese guy half in the lab who was doing a project on deer velvet (the skin from immature antlers, thought to be an aphrodisiac in China). On hearing that the postdoc had been married for some years without offspring he came in with a bag of sliced young antler with instructions to stir fry it as a 'tonic'. Since I was married with kids I didn't get any ;-(
Sometimes working on mouse muscles has it's drawbacks. I would be okay eating rat, there's enough eating on a rat. But mice are not worth bothering with. Less meat on the hind limbs than a frog leg.
They're so hard to prove their effectiveness given that they just trigger the placebo effect when you take them yourself. Then when trying to give them to someone else, usually its the theater surrounding the dosing that gets them in the mood, rather than the aphrodisiac itself...
Surely one small problem with making solar cells with organic components would be that almost (if not all) organic components suffer some form of degradation when exposed to prolonged UV light, and of course with solar cells it's that UV light that you want to work well due to the higher energy levels (which is what causes the damage).
I can see these cells being like Oled screens, very nice but fairly short lived and susceptible to damage
Not so sure about that, given that installation is a large component of the total cost of a PV system. Already you can buy solar cells for under $1/peak watt. 10 years ago it was closer to $5/peak watt. Even if the panels were free, the rest of a grid tied system (inverter and installation) is not going down in price at all in the case of inverters, and going up in price in the case of installation - you can outsource the manufacturing of the panels to China, but not their installation!