back to article Prawn cocktail offers hot new way to make solar cells

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 …

  1. Robert Helpmann??
    Childcatcher

    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.

    1. Muscleguy

      Re: Seconds?

      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.

  2. Neoc

    Perfect!

    Sounds like a perfect solution for Oz: shrimps and sun are part of our psyche down here.

  3. Mark 85

    Ah.. recycling at its finest

    So after we eat the little yummies, where do we send the shells? (I buy fresh or frozen in the shell)

  4. Frumious Bandersnatch

    So...

    that's why flamingos are pink?

    1. Mark 85

      Re: So...

      Indeed. I'll assume you're being serious so here's a link: http://www.allaboutwildlife.com/are-flamingos-pink-because-they-eat-shrimp

  5. frank ly

    Yes!

    All we need now is a way to weaponise limpets' teeth then we can use chitin solar cells to power them, then ....... Oh, I'm sorry; I went into mad scientist mode.

    1. Anonymous Blowhard

      Re: Yes!

      The correct use for chitin solar cells is to power frickin' lasers attached to frickin' sharks!

      I'm surrounded by frickin' idiots!

      1. Little Mouse

        Re: Yes!

        Solar powered Chitin Plating perhaps...

        Or do Chrysalids only come out at night?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

    bicycles will outrun formula one cars and pigs will fly.

    1. Kevin Johnston
      Joke

      Re: 'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

      Ooh look....a Police Helicopter

    2. Daniel Hutty

      Re: 'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

      "bicycles will outrun formula one cars and pigs will fly."

      Nearly there with the first part...

      Bike outruns ferrari

      Now to work on the porcine aviation part...

      1. Muscleguy

        Re: 'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

        I expect you could force evolve/mutate pigs into flying beasties but they would no longer be pigs. Think something more like a megabat. All of whom will of course be called Eric.

      2. Mark 85

        Re: 'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

        "Now to work on the porcine aviation part..."

        Catapult? Except that the landings are hard on the pig and also whatever he/she lands on.... Maybe some SpaceX technology is needed for the landing part.

        1. Martin Budden Silver badge

          Re: 'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

          Catapult? Except that the landings are hard on the pig and also whatever he/she lands on...

          A parachute could save their bacon.

    3. Tom 13

      Re: 'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

      Given that a sprinter can outrun a formula one car if the race is only 25 feet, I expect the bicycle will also do it easily.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seNRu5JjpDM

    4. James Micallef Silver badge

      Re: 'Once we've improved their efficiency...'

      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

      1. Salts

        Re: 'Once we've improved their 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.

  7. Richard Taylor 2

    Hmm - i cansee somevery unhappy prawns in my future

    1. Muscleguy

      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.

      1. Crazy Operations Guy

        Ah, aphrodisiacs...

        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...

  8. Jess--

    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

    1. James Pickett

      "some form of degradation"

      Not to mention the fishy smell...

    2. Steve Foster

      @Jess--

      That will be part of the work to come, but ultimately if (say) power-comparable solar cells made with chitin last half as long but are only 10% of the cost of rare-metal based cells, then they'd make commercial sense.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        @Steve Foster

        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!

    3. Muscleguy

      Read the article. They carbonise the chitin/chitosan which burns off organic components that could rot. It's simply a cheap and abundant feedstock, not the finished article.

      1. bep

        hmmm

        "They carbonise the chitin/chitosan which burns off organic components.." I suppose they used one of those new-fangled furnaces, what's that acronym again? Oh that's it - BBQ!

  9. razorfishsl

    All smells a bit fishy to me.....

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