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Invisible Solar Nano Cells Promise Clean Energy
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is reporting that Harvard scientists have developed a silicon nanowire 200 hundred times thinner than a human hair that crank out up to 200 picowatts. Charles Leiber from Harvard University, who devised the technology with colleagues, is quoted: "An individual nanoelectronic device will indeed consume very little power, but to do something interesting will require many interconnected devices and thus the power requirement — even for nanosystems — can be a challenge". Conventional sources, he added, are "bulky, non-renewable and expensive" by comparison."
I'd be 95 cents short of a dollar.
We don't want to succumb to bogosity.
what's sad is that this was discovered in the attempt to create a more life like toupe;P
Anyone ever read Vernor Vinge's 'A Deepness in the Sky'? These things might be a great power source for the localizers he mentions.
The Danes call them "Magical Elves".
Same theory pretty much. Let me know when they're around again because I need some cookies from those fuckers in the goddamn tree.
...When it is going to be available on the market though.
"...Charles Leiber and colleagues at Harvard University, have devised a 'silicon nanowire' that can convert light into electrical energy.... ...Two hundred billionths of a watt may not seem much, but at nanoscale it is enough to provide a steady output of electricity to run ultralow power electronics, including some that could be worn on -- or even inside -- the body. "
Erm, how bright is the inside of a body!?
AT&ROFLMAO
Your mom promises clean energy
Guess they could even be manufactured right into fiberoptic cables or applied after. If these are successful the possibilities for uses could be staggering, especially depending on the developement of nano-devices to use them and how applied.
I hate science reporting. It's also nice to know the editors aren't doing their jobs (ZDNet, I don't blame /.). What is a single strand? Is that 10mm long? 10cm? 1m? There is a big difference between those three. The summary just chops that sentence up worse. And why do they always use human hair as a comparison? Who's hair is that? Some people have very thin hair. For some people it is quite a bit thicker. If you are comparing it to the average, you should include that word. Also are we talking theoretical maximum or a practical estimation under normal daylight conditions?
It's great to know this generates 200 picowatts per something. How about comparing it to a normal production solar cell. I'm glad you can make it thin, but it must need some kind of support structure to survive, so how much thicker does it need to be so it is actually useful? After all, the silicon part of a solar cell is just a fraction of it's thickness.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Any biologists out there who wishes to inform me of how this solar cell compares in efficiency and equivalent energy production for photosynthesis. I understand that they're are two very different forms of energy (storage medium may be a better comparison) but I would be interested as I have thought that perhaps natural evolution had already long ago derived the most efficient ways of recovering energy to drive its organisms. I wonder if the real future of small scale generators/batteries lies with organic synthesis of energy through genetically modified organism with some medium transforming the resulting chemical energy into electrical energy (not unlike a battery but with it's own complications necessary for dealing in the organic compounds) rather than straight up developing life-facsimiles.
Then again maybe I'm just rambling on after approaching the 40th consecutive waking hour... It'd be nice to know.
Demented But Determined.
Where is the promise that this will be commercialized in a few years and we can paint our houses with it? What kind of solar article is this?
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We all want to look for macro-applications right away, but it seems pretty obvious that this is meant for the micro.
I'm not going to stoop to doing the math (*ahem*), but I'm imagining we're not talking about a huge efficiency gain over high-end conventional sources.
Not to mention the "assembly barrier" to something like this. You though installing that modchip to put Fedora on your XBox was hard, that was just a few fiddly wires. Imagine some poor Chinese factory slave-labor dude with his soldering iron and a microscope and directions to make a 1-meter square photocell out of 1.4x10^e9 nanofibers.
On the other hand, the simple practice (among others) of slicing things thinner for the sake of slicing them thinner led us to semiconductors, so I'm all for this geeky hobby of making things tiny.
"Invisible" "Solar" "Nano" "Cells" ... "Clean Energy"
I WON SLASHDOT BINGO!!!
I think this article was meant for Dora the Explorer club, and not /.
...The cable itself looks, like the cables used to hook up cable television networks...But the similarity stops there...Incoming light generates electrons in the outer shell, which are then swept into the second layer and the inner core along micropores. These "holes", as they are called, carry an equal, but opposite, charge as electrons, which means that the two particles move in opposite directions in the presence of an electric field.
The journalist is either completely clueless or trying to make it comprehensible for kindergarten. The result is so wrong and incomprehensible that it is worthless:
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
1)what is your take on the magic PV cleaning on the rovers, especially some get cleaned, some don't. Is it all dust devil cleaning, or is there perhaps some other static situation going on?
2)what do you think of the thin film printed PV that is hitting the market now or "real soon"? Any bets or SWAGS on which company has a realistic and decent product? I realize you most likely work with very high end, maximum watts per sq. meter, wheras on ye olde earth, watts per dollar is probably more of a practical business solution
thanks in advance
Curious, does that mean 20,000, or is it just redundant moonspeak? I've heard people say things like 'a thousand million', but never for such small numbers.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
If it's a solar cell doesn't it have to absorb some wavelength of electromagnetic radiation?
Then it isn't invisible, is it?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Two hundred whole picowatts?!!
A picowatt is a unit of power equal to 10^-12 watts, or one-millionth of a microwatt. That's a lot of zeros and a really tiny number.
Lets do some questimating! An average hair is around 50 micrometers thick, so lets guess they are talking about a 0.25 micrometer thick wire. Lets guess they are talking about a 10 cm long piece. Plugging the numbers and their stated power yields a whopping 0.008 watts/squaremeter. A cheap 6% efficient solar cell in bright sunlight (1 sol = 1000watts/sqmeter) gives you 60 watts/square meter. That's 4 orders of magnitude worse than a cheap solar cell.
I haven't run the numbers, but I think they'd be better off using the wire as an antenna and grabbing some of the free emf floating in the air.
Would someone do the:
"I for one, welcome my invisible solar nano cell overlords" bit.
I miss it.....
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Problem is, they're not green.
You mean future AI's won't place me in a jar and hook me up to the Matrix to farm me for electricity? WTF? Are you saying that was like 'science fiction' or something?
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Let's see, we've got nanowire that's "Thinner than a human hair", and generates 200 picowatts of electricity. So, if we use these things tethered at one end and free to sway loose at the other, we have a mat of electric-generating "fur". Fuzzy satellites? Implant into the human scalp (To cover those bald spots) and you could power your cybernetic implants. Self-powering Electro-Luminescent wire (Charges when off)?
Weave these things into a cloth, and we could have spaceships with a power-generating solar sail. Or sailboats that generate the power for their electronics (And/or onboard electric motors) with their sails. Or electric cars with power-generating soft-tops. Heck, weave a cloth of these things and embed it in epoxy resin and you've got power-generating carbon-fiber-like body panels. Just paint the inside and use a clear laquer on the outside.
Clothing that powers your wearable PC? In fact, what's to stop this being used as a low-current power conductor to start off with?
The possibilities are (almost) endless...
Err, we do?
Don't believe everything you read (duh).
Let's do a little math. 200 picowatts. At 1 volt, that's 200 picoamps. So you can drive a circuit with a resistance of ( R=E/I), wait for it--- 5,000 megohms. That's about 100,000 times a typical circuit resistance. I'm not saying it can't be done, but it's going to be mighty tricky to design a useful circuit at those power levels. Even more challenging-- eventually the circuit has to drive some interface, be it a USB port, a LED, or a buzzer, and those require millions of times more power than is available with this gadget.
You can bet the good ol' developers of the Land Warrior will be keeping an eye on this. The concept of the Land Warrior in it's current form sucks, as pointed out by numerous posts, but one of the major downfalls (aside from the ironic decrease in situational awareness) is humping around 30 pounds of batteries... Of course, the suit would only be good in the day time if they used this, but hey, that is their problem to figure out!
Nope. Photosynthesis typically runs at about 1-2% energy conversion efficiency; the best plants ever are about 4%. The best solar cells are now hitting 40%.
On the other hand, photosynthesis isn't just about energy conversion-- plants also synthesize sugars.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...I'm saying it was more like poorly-written fanboy fantasy fiction.
is all over the place. First they talk about a solar cell. Then they talk about implantation. Someone should tell the journalist that ther is very little sunlight inside our bodies. I think they are talking about a new type of nanocell (tube?). However, that nfo was lost in all of the vague applications. The journalist should have reported on the difference b/w this nano-cell and other related research such as [carbon] nanotubes. These cell are compsed of 3 layers. What are the layers? Are all 3 layers Si? How are they dopped? And what are the dopants? How is the nano-cell contructed? All of this nfo would have been in the paper. This is a poorly written article.
http://science.harvard.edu/node/7582
http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn12800-lightharvesting-nanowire-could-drive-tiny-devices.html
hybrid solar that was built in Pulau Kapas is not only the first in Malaysia but also the first in SouthEast Asia...
With DHCP pools you often end up with multiple people making edits from the same IP. This means that you can't really consider an anoymous editor to be one person. FWIW, it can be interesting to look at the edits previously made by my co-workers on my work IP address.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
well ofcourse with my invissible dollars..
Or Euro's you wont see the difference
And since it's also nano you wont even feel it it's thinner the a hair and smaller then pencil point...
hahaha
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.