New Photovoltaics Made with Titanium Foil

Memorize writes "A company called Daystartech has released a new type of photovoltaic cell which, unlike almost all the cells currently in use, does not silicon. This is based on a thin titanium film. Given the current shortage of solar-grade silicon, and all-time high oil prices, maybe titanium solar panels are here at the right time. The questions are, will they release it as a consumer solar product, and what will be the price per kilowatt hour?"

Comments

Slicon Shortage

[klausner]

Like, you think that titanium, and the equipment required to work titanium comes cheap? Cheaper than sand?

Re:Slicon Shortage

[Arthur Dent]

Actually a new titanium refining process was discovered a short while ago

Here we report an electrochemical method for the direct reduction of solid TiO2, in which the oxygen is ionized, dissolved in a molten salt and discharged at the anode, leaving pure titanium at the cathode. The simplicity and rapidity of this process compared to conventional routes should result in reduced production costs and the approach should be applicable to a wide range of metal oxides.

Re:Slicon Shortage

[digitalchinky]

The USA has miles upon miles of old military aircraft from what I've seen on television. There should be quite a large amount of titanium left in wing attachments, turbines, and other hard points on decaying fighter jets. I have a small rod of it (from an Airforce friend) that was scrap from an F-111 wing repair. Not very big, but big enough to see how damn strong the stuff is. (few centimeters long)

Took some serious hitting with a sledge hammer and a vice to put any kind of a bend in the metal. Impressive stuff.

Re:Slicon Shortage

[K8Fan]

Took some serious hitting with a sledge hammer and a vice to put any kind of a bend in the metal. Impressive stuff.

Want to see something really cool? Check out "Liquidmetal". It's an alloy of titanium and other metals and has some really amazing properties. For one, it can be cast and does not form crystals like titanium, has a low melting tempature compared to it's component metals - it can actually be injection-molded. It's twice as strong as titanium by weight and much more flexible. There's a bounce-test video on their web site that it a hoot.

Right now it's being used for the hinges in that new Motorola Razor phone, various sporting goods and military applications. Cool stuff.

How does this compare?

[AtariAmarok]

How does this compare to what is used as solar cells in spacecraft now? Sounds interesting. Imagine, not a beowulf cluster, but a solar-sail type of spaceship in which the sun pushes against a huge sail made of this stuff, and also sends electricity to the ship.

Solar cells from biology

[Bifurcati]

At University of Queensland (in Australia) where I study, we're developing solar cells out of "solid solids" - flexible polymers/plastics. The hope is that as well as being even more efficient, they'll be easy to use - they're flexible, and can be bent, twisted, shaped, etc.

One possibility is to use melanin - the skin pigment that gives our skins colour. Being in Australia, of course, researching melanin is of significant interest to us! It's yet another example of biology helping to make really cool physics - more details are available on UQ's physics blog.

sweet deal

[SuperBanana]

DayStar Technologies (NASDAQ:DSTI) today received confirmation that the State of New York has awarded the University at Albany College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (CNSE) at the Albany NanoTech research complex a $750,000 Technology Transfer Incentive Program Grant to work with DayStar in the development of optimized substrate templates for CIGS solar cell applications.

[...]

Over a two year period, both DayStar and Albany NanoTech will each contribute $375,000 and NYSTAR will contribute $750,000.

Nice. So, basically, The state of NY puts in three quarters of a million dollars because DayStar promises not to go elsewhere and to graciously donate $350,000 to research that...will directly benefit them and pretty much nobody else.

I'm sorry, but I'm getting really sore for public funds being used to bankroll essentially private R&D done by public, for profit companies. Of course, it's not nearly as bad as the biotech industry, which whores itself out like nobody's business. Did you know we give the biotech industry about $30 billion (yes, billion) a year? Just GIVE it away? No strings attached? That exceeds -estimated- TOTAL tax (local, state, and federal) collected by around $6BN. Virtually 100% of all biotech related R&D is paid for by you and me, while the industry rakes in well over $200BN a year.

And to think they have the gall to whine about how expensive drug research is, or how risky it is! They're NOT PAYING FOR IT!

solar schmolar -- CROPS are the real solar energy

[CFD339]

Plants user solar energy. They don't move. Things that move, need to eat plants, or eat animals that eat plants.

Why? There isn't enough energy in the sunlight to sustain the metabolic rate required for movement. In billions of years, nature hasn't figured out how to covert enough sunlight into energy to sustain an animal's movement other than by concentrating it first into vegetable matter which can be eaten.

For humans to make use of energy, we pretty much have to burn something. We have to release solar energy stored as food, then in most cases concentrated in the form of hydrocarbons.

Fission energy, fancy as it may be, is still about just making water hot. For that matter, if they get there, so will fusion energy be.

We humans are stunningly good at burning things and making excuses for the things we do that are essentially asocial. Aside from that, we're not exactly all that and a bag of chips.

There's no such thing as free energy. The trick we need to find is how to tap bigger forces. Tidal forces with tethered floating generators which rise and fall with the tides and capture that motion as energy would be good. Finding that so called vacume energy between particals would be a fairly useful trick as well.

Making giant solar panels which turn sunlight into energy at less efficiency than plants, then waste most of it in transmission and storage overhead is ultimately not going to win.

More near term, we need to find or engineer a crop which is ideally suited to concentrating sunlight into a hydrocarbon or sugar that can be stored, transported without sigificant loss, then burned.

Unless one of you /. people has found a really efficient ENDOTHERMIC reaction. That would be very cool. :-)

Re:This has all been gone over before...

[TFoo]

Umm, I could be missing something, but your initial statement that "Photoelectric won't work, won't solve even a small fraction of our power needs, not remotely" seems to be completely wrong.

A quick Google search shows that on earth every square meter receives about 4.2kwh of energy per day over a 24 hour period.

A quick look at my electric bill says I use about 20kwh/day as a rough average -- another Google search suggests that the average US household uses approximately 25kwh/day

...So, finishing the math: using 15% efficiency solar cells, the Average US Household needs only 40 square meters (430 square feet) of solar cells to cover all its energy needs. Heck, I could use 5% solar cells on my roof in downtown San Francisco, and STILL have 2x extra capacity to sell back to the grid!

Don't get me wrong: Solar won't solve everything, particularly in applications like transportation where energy storage is an issue --- and cheap Fission IS something we should have figured out a long time ago --- but please don't resort to misinformation to make your points, it only weakens what you are saying.