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Solar Cells — Made In a Pizza Oven
stylemessiah writes "The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer. This was developed to address the high cost of cells and in particular for the world's poorest regions. She wanted to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy. This could have profound (and a good profound) implications for education and health in those in the poorest regions in the world. And it all started with her parents giving her a solar energy kit when she was 10..."
Cue the feminazis on 3... 2... 1...
I guess the submitter was also Australian.
Second post?
"... is a crafty chick ..."
Sexism ftw.
Last time I checked, they had already figured out how to produce low-cost solar cells. They're already shipping. The tech mentioned in the article may take 5 years to fully commercialize.
How many solar cells do you need to power a pizza oven, anyway?
She wants to help the poor people of the world.
So, she found a process that uses cheap, easily accessible parts that would allow people in poor countries to help themselves.
And she patented it. So she can commercialize it.
Fuck off and die, bitch.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
MacGyver would have done it with just the nail polish.
now we just need to figure out how to get every poor country an abundance of pizza ovens, nail polish and inkjet printers
What is @2 billion? is that a profound(a good profound) mistake?
Seriously though, can't Taco take a few seconds to read any of this? My eyes hurt.
Nerd
Is use of this research patented?
Aaaaaughhhhhh!
Condescend much?
Why use a lame term like that? Women are just as smart as men and when they do something brilliant they are recognized as something special because they happen to be a woman. So we have to do something like call them "Chick" to degrade them.... Well, that's how I feel anyway. Flame away! And yes, I'm male.
Just so nobody gets the idea that this woman could be a scientist with an important breakthrough, let's refer to her as a "chick" from now on. Or maybe a "babe." In fact, why not emulate Don Imus and call her a "goggle-eyed ho"?
C'mon, Taco. Join the fucking twenty-first century.
I piss off bigots.
Well, she is pretty hot. I'd tap that solar energy if you know what I mean.
That's impressive. Though there seem to be scant details on efficiency and cost comparisons (I'm assuming this is more environmentally friendly to make as well as much cheaper).
Of course, it would of been more impressive if full details were diclosed online for people to take advantage of.
Is it possible to have your patent cake and eat it? The woman is clearly a brilliant engineer and deserves full credit for her work, she also states a worthwhile desire to help people across the world. So is it possible for her to obtain full commercial protection for her invention and then release all the details free for non-commercial use and reduced license fees for the third world? This would be ideal.
After all, no technology is going to change the lifestyles of poor people if they cannot afford to buy/license it.
On the other hand it would be unfair if she learned the Trevor Bayliss lesson the hard way - really clever little gadget swamped by low cost clones from asia from which he gained not a penny. As always I guess the big winners were the lawyers.
Even if she is a Sheila!
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
When asked to describe the process she says "To pattern the cell we spray on something like nail polish and then inkjet print a kind of nail polish remover which lets us etch certain parts of the wafer. This creates a metallisation pattern so we can deposit aluminium on the back surface of the solar cell and create our metal contacts to both the P and N-type silicon simultaneously using a very cheap, low temperature pizza oven! And hey presto we've created a simple, low-cost solar cell without having to use expensive high tech equipment or high temperature processes!"
(from here)
You call a girl that developed a new process to manufacture colar cells "A crafty chick"? Higly respectful.
Here's another photo minus the huge goggles.
"The winner of several Eureka Science Awards in Australia is a crafty chick who devised a way to create solar cells cheaply using a pizza oven, nail polish and an inkjet printer."
Afforable but uses an Inkjet Printer? You almost fooled me there. With the cost of ink being what it is, it'll be cheaper to just go out and buy a solar cell.
headline:
female: "crafty chick turns out clever "invention", wants to "help people" - awwww!"
hypothetical:
male: "a thrifty, socially motivated boy genius has turned industry on its head with an astounding demonstration of scientific innovation and prowess beyond his years."
Now all poor people without electricity can simply print their own solar cells on their inkjet printers!
Nominee video of Nicole Kuepper
Vodcast of People's Choice awards ceremony (Look for ep 26, 2008)
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
If you do a little digging, you find there is far less to this story than you might think.
All the lady did is develop a simple way of printing electrical contacts onto the silicon surface.
That's a mighty small part of the overall cell's cost. It's not going to bring cell prices down so the "2 billion" can afford them. heck, the top 2 billion can't afford them.
In most Australian Universities the postgraduate student owns the IP. I can't find the equivalent for UNSW, but here is the University of Sydney's policy (a close competitor to UNSW). It is quite clear that by default postgraduate students own their results.
First quote:
"I love working with passionate people who want to help address climate change and poverty"
Second quote:
"it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology"
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
for a lot cheaper. All I need is a bunch of guys with shovels, and a boat, and we can give the world's poor good old coal. It's our environmental priorities, which we choose, that make energy more expensive. If we all could tolerate soot filled cities, like London in 1880, we could have dirt cheap heat and light and electricity just by burning coal and sometimes making steam with it for power.
The point is, when people make announcements like this, its not to give poor people the most energy, it is rather to give them energy that is fundamentally more expensive, but to lower that window as much as possible.
So let's not say that we are giving the poor the "cheapest energy possible", because, that's not what we're doing.
This is my sig.
We can't have just anybody making power. We have to have giant solar collectors behind big fences and huge farms of giant windmills with wires, miles and miles of wires and big towers and meters to track and charge money for power...
Why does she hate America so much to think that people actually want to generate their own power? America wants monopolistic power companies to build and provide expensive, unreliable power systems to developing nations.
HOW she makes a solar cell from pizza oven and inkjet printer? the most basic in science is show how to do to anyone (with time and resources, off course) try too and see if works or not.
Or maybe is "hard-vaporware" (hardware + vapor)
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
"She wanted to give the @2 billion people around the world who dont have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy."
What does "@2 billion" mean? "At two billion?" Maybe "~2 billion?"
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
What I don't see is any mention of whether she is printing onto silicon wafers. If its silicon wafers, then this is just a PR opportunity by a university. Presumably her patent application will become visible in another year and we'll be able to tell.
Otherwise this would be a great DIY thing.
--
Luck is just skill you didn't know you had.
Now that clearly illustrates that purchase of solar energy kits should be outlawed or at least limited in a similar fashion as distribution of chemical kits, etc.
You know, think of the children ... what if they harm themselves with a high voltage they may generated with such kits?
Or what if some terrorist got hold of 'em?
...
You know, I'm kidding. But still such course of action (i.e. banning such kit) may still happen for millions of reasons "our" (and "their") representatives can come up with.
hany
Anyone who knows anything about solar power is that it is girly girly energy like this article proves. Poor people are poor because they probably deserve it or did something wrong. Solar cells won't ever be good enough for anything other than kids lab kits, and besides what happens if the sun goes out, where will your new age hippy solar cells be then. Nuclear is so much better than solar because it works in the dark and even when it rains. So what if it blows up from time to time, nuclear accidents are overrated anyway, and are probably good for the environment because it scares people away so the forest can re-grow.
There is no reason why we all can't have safe little nuclear power plants in our backyard, today.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
An advocate of green technology, she gives talks about solar energy to the public, has held miniature solar car races to teach indigenous children about renewable energy, and was a delegate at the 2020 Youth Summit in Canberra in April.
Did I miss a few years? The brownies I ate last night were good, but I didnt think they were THAT good!
This is why they are dangerous. Kids might grow up and invent something.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Oh look! A girl did something cute with science!
Never mind that it isn't useful.
It's a cute trick to manufacture low quality solar cells with improvised materials and tools, but it's not a new trick.
If it was a guy, they'd be treating this like the tinkertoy computer, or any other show-off joke project.
It's like what happened with James Washington Carver, the Man Who Invented Peanut Butter. He didn't invent peanut butter (that was around before him). He claimed to have invented hundreds of peanut products, but didn't actually document any manufacturing process for them. He promoted peanut oil as a quack remedy. He wrote some decent pamphlets on the known fertilizing properties of legumes (such as peanut plants), and some questionable ones on the industrial value of the peanut.
Dude wasn't a real inventor of anything useful or a productive research scientist. The only things he got right were the things he simply heard from other people and repeated, and he mixed those together with his own bad ideas, so he spread misinformation as well as information.
But he was black, so a myth grew around him. All of the progressives of the day, and of the following days, liked to have a "black Edison" to talk about. So they imagined themselves one, and to hell with the facts!
Let's look at the keywords here: female, student, renewable, sustainable, cottage industry, clean energy, developing country, global warming.
It's a feel-good fluff story. People are believing in it because they want to, and that's how a science project (in the gradeschool sense) gets treated as a breakthrough.
She deserves her pat on the head, but no, she doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Actually, if you take into account the social, human, and environmental costs of coal production, you really can't call coal cheap.
the coal industry has taken a toll on Appalachia and its people.
What she invented was a way to create the contacts of the solar cells - basically by coating EXISTING SILICON SOLAR CELLS with aluminium and blocking the deposition or etch process with a polymer, partially removed by an organic solvent. She used cheap machinery to do that - which does not mean that it is the cheapest process. Printing a book on an offset press is cheaper than printing it with an inkjet printer (and this is a fairly good analogy).
Which does not mean it is a small feat, since it reduces the cost of that part of the fab. Unfortunately, the big cost is the silicon itself. Most labs try to go to thin-film cells, or non-silicon based cells, to reduce the basic material cost.
GUNS to hunt and protect themselves. What fucking good is a night lite when you are starving and have crazy warlords participating in genocide on a scale that Hitler himself would be proud of? The chick is hot, but as soon as she blathered about global warming her perky tits could no longer hold my interest.
Slashdot male:
She's pulling on every string that makes a pointless science project get reported in the news as a world-changing innovation:
clean energy - anti-poverty - anti-big-business - women in science - student
This will come to nothing. This process does not make solar cells more cheaply than established processes. It does not make better solar cells. It's just cute because it's improvised.
The article divulges almost nothing about the process or its documentation - with one exception.
It is patented.
But alas, we can be certain that it was patented passionately by people who only want to help address climate change and poverty.
Is it time to flush yet?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'd like to get a Silicon Diavolo with garlic and Mozzarella please.
I just, like, used my hairspray, nail polish and a laserjet, to print off these cute little circuit designs that I was going to put on my anti-nerd campaign signs but then I got, like, you know, hungry for some of that delish french bread pizza, and I accidentally, put the prints in the pizza oven instead of the food because I am such an airhead, and wow, like, I got these solar cell thingies. I am so cool!
now that's geek food!
> She wanted to give the @2 billion people around the world who dont have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy.
Screw that, I'm building a new set of roof tiles and giving myself the gift of light and cheap energy :D
Don't kid yourself. It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Would you like anchovies with that?
Where is the HOWTO?
It also means spic, wop, kike, dago, polack, beaner, honky and raghead. It's pejorative, and anybody who thinks otherwise has his head up his ass.
The only people who may use it safely are those who choose to use it of themselves.
I piss off bigots.
Could this process be adapted for home printing of semiconductors? Cheap open source electronics any one...? I'd love to be able to download new toys from sourceforge and then just print them out.
Don't ask me where I came up with "James".
Slab Hardchest!
[laugh] Cue "Oh, that doesn't bother me at all" posturing.
Screw the patent, put the solar-pizza-recipe out on a blog today! She will make millions in speaking engagements... but alas, she has to patent to tenure. Put the design out today!, maybe you will get the Nobel Prize. Wouldn't that be nice! Think!!! or, like all these slashdot "maybe someday this will cure cancer" articles, these headlines are just about raising venture capital. but alas, she has to stall all the other 10yr olds while she gets a patent lawyer. This is crap.
I think your whole argument is so 20th century.
Let's just hope people don't start making solar cells in their pizza ovens, then celebrate their success with pizza made in those ovens. I don't think the dopants used are good for one's health.
And then there's the increased health-care expenditures and other such costs conveniently hidden by current economic systems.
It's not "hidden". It's that, given a choice, most people don't actually care enough about the environment to want to pay for it. Greens say that "oh, the real costs of the environment aren't captured, its a fallacy of capitalism because people don't feel they need it..", but, people don't need $100 shoes anyway, but they buy them. Similarly, if you had a car that was built 100% Green by American labor in perfect work conditions, with zero accidents, people would still choose the car that was $2000 less that was built in a sweat shop with a limb removal rate of %20 in a polluted smogville, if they could get it.
All this talk about trying to adequately "capture the costs" of the environment is really more along the lines of trying to compel people to pay them.
This is my sig.
too bad my hairy bagel would scare them both off.
No. To be accurate, the idea of adjusting for externalities is an attempt to compel those who directly get the benefits, to pay for them, rather than spreading the burden onto governments, the populace at large, etc., etc.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Given the laws of supply and demand.... the price of coal is not goint to be 1880s levels
The real price of coal is probably lower because in the 1880s they were still using thousands of miners shovels and now they just blast the top off the mountain off, use a giant tractor to dump the stuff into a freight train a mile long, and whole working of the mine to delivery probably takes less 1000 people per trainload of coal. I mean, in the 1880s, they still were rolling out airbrakes for trains and even then the locomotives required a separate fireman and a guy in the caboose and so on. Now it can just be one guy driving the whole train.
This is my sig.
If it's patented there is a patent application somewhere that describes how you do it.
So where is the patent?
He definitely didn't invent peanut butter, or crop rotation. Whether he had any significant effect on the popularization of crop rotation or peanut products is highly questionable.
Crop rotation, and the scramble to make use of its by-products, were in a general upswing in the American South during Carver's career. His agricultural bulletins (the "pamphlets" I mentioned earlier) echoed the recommendations of agricultural bulletins from other authors a few years before his. He was going with the flow.
He ran a lab, after a fashion, but he never bothered to keep a notebook. He claimed to have invented all sorts of things, but he almost never shared the formulas. He took out a total of 3 patents in his life, on products using peanuts to make substitutes for existing products (a cosmetic product and two types of woodstain), and started companies to commercialize them. All failed miserably.
He did try to cash in on his "scientific research", but his products were pathetic and he didn't succeed. Despite this, he claimed to be uninterested in money, like an ugly girl proud of her virginity.
Carver was a celebrity and a rather dishonest self-promoter. He held a symbolic role as the Black Edison, and he played it to the fullest. If he hadn't been a black man, nobody would remember him at all.
He was charming, and a good public speaker. He showed remarkable initiative in all his life. He was a groundbreaking African American academic. He was an enthusiast and passionate promoter of the latest agricultural technology. He achieved fame, the friendship of powerful men, and important posts. These are all admirable things.
But he did no scientific research of note. He made no useful inventions. Whenever he went against the orthodoxy, he erred. His only successes were in the subjective realms of academia and social life.
George Washington Carver might be considered a great man, but he was no great scientist, and no great inventor.
That's the most interesting part for most of /.
I'm only here for the picture!
I keep forgetting, is this the year of Linux on the desktop, cheap solar power or Duke Nukem Forever?
Can we possibly consider options like driving smaller cars and switching to high efficiency bulbs before we go back to good ole London town.....
I know it's fun to watch pigeons coughing up blood but sadly so do people when it gets bad.
It's a good point, but, think of the children! :-) If we didn't have as many old people, social security and medicare payments would be a lot lower. I mean, if we all died at 65 because of air quality, we could have nearly a trillion dollars a year -extra- that we could spend on our schools and benefit our children over the elderly.
This is my sig.
"Bah, don't these people know that there are STARVING PEOPLE in Africa? Why don't they send the money directly over as FOOD instead of giving them ?" WAH WAH WAH!!
No. To be accurate, the idea of adjusting for externalities is an attempt to compel those who directly get the benefits, to pay for them
No, because, without the conversion of a resource into a product such as energy or goods, then the community suffers. If there is no coal plant, you have perfect air, but you freeze to death in winter, can't see at night... you know, live in the stone ages. So, I have a coal plant, belching filth out into the air. I deliver the benefit of electricity. I light the streets and homes and bring heat and people like that and they pay for it.
Now, some people who get that electricity don't care that I dump soot into the air, in fact, most don't. But a few do... and so, they actually go and press to regulate my plant to benefit themselves, and in doing so pass a product (cleaner electricity), to everyone else, that no one wants.
This is my sig.
From TFA: "Ms Kuepper is a PhD student and lecturer in the school of photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering at the University of NSW."
Looks like this could be the patent: http://v3.espacenet.com/textdoc?DB=EPODOC&IDX=AU2006317517&F=0.
around 1982 I actually obtained a science-fair-like kit from some big-name old corporation - let's say Bell or GE. it contained silicon wafers, paint-on dopant material and a tiny ceramic widget that screwed into a light socket (diffusion furnace). it was already hard to scrape up info on how to get the kit, and they probably stopped distributing them for liability reasons. iirc, I had to supply my own hydrofluoric acid that was part of the metalization step. I can't remember whether the cells I made actually worked ;)
....how's that Asperger's Syndrome working for you?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
If the inventor had been male and the summary had called him a "dude", would you be calling it "typical Slashdot misandrany"?
No, because you're a hypocrite trying to feed a persecution complex.
...are they free?
By cooking a copper plate you can cause a layer of cuprous oxide to form on one side of the plate. If you take a 2nd copper plate and put them in a saline solution, you can measure 50 or so uA in sunlight.
So, maybe she found a replacement for the liquid saline solution or uses the fingernail polish to seal a sandwiched material soaked in saline.
If interested, search using "solar cell copper cuprous" and you'll find a good list of references to this.
One big problem here for using these for lighting solutions is the fact that when there is light to generate the electricity, they don't need the light. What is needed is a combination DIY solar cell which is also a battery. Do that and have it store even just 100 or 200 mAh of energy and with an LED, you could possibly light up millions of dark homes around the world. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
seeing the patent listing I had forgot about the mention of the inkjet printer. She definitely is not doing the cooked copper/cuprous oxide method of building a solar cell.
I'm not sure how many "dark" places are also going to have electricity for computers and inkjet printers yet still need this to make solar cells. I guess we'll see what happens with the patent and if DIYers can and will create these for others to use.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Rah!!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Looks like most slash-dotters don't understand why PV are not going to be powering the grid any time soon. If you really want to understand, I advise going to http://www.tinaja.com/ and search on PV.
In the mean time - this struck me as being on the same level of wasting recourses as the failed pig-iron production of the communist era. Some things don't do well on the small scale (small is often not at all beautiful if you have any hope of being practical).
The very best in PV are tying to get to $1/watt (not there). The reality is they will not be practical unless they can reach $0.10/watt. This magnitude of improvement has fundamentals to overcome.
I love the way the editor manages to, not only call the promising young scientist a "chick", but also fail to mention her name (which is Nicole Kuepper, by the way).
The research was sponsored by an enormously rich Chinese bloke (supposedly the richest on mainland China). He did his PhD at the same Strine Uni, but had trouble getting commercial support in Australia so went back to China to make a fortune making photovoltaic cells cheaper. I'd guess that he will get a share of the patent and probably the uni will, too.
... is a wood-fired silicon wafer manufactory, to go with it. Oh, and nail polish.
So, the ideal target market is probably a third-world Italian-derived family with a backyard silicon fab and a teenage daughter.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Go to the patent app to see it for yourself.
... never got around to telling her she's hot, my experience indicates that if one actually wants an answer to a tech question, telling someone something she already knows doesn't work well.
For practical details like whether she used a Canon IP3/4/5000 based on ease of refilling cartridges with whatever floats her boat... let's hope Ms. Kuepper writes the article for Make I just wrote her to suggest she write.
Getting the patent info and her e-mail address only took a few minutes of digging via google. Though I'll admit I
Besides, given that I mentioned slashdot, it's likely as not she'll show up on this discussion somewhere to tell us WTF she actually did.
Tech Public Policy stuff
to give the ~2 billion people around the world who don't have electricity the gift of light and cheap energy."...while "it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology"
I failed to see how the two words patented and cheap could come together nicely.
Solar and Silicon Cells in an Oven has been done before-- it was published in a Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American that I read in high-school.
So was there any useful info in the article? I'm sure there was a very cheap system for solar cell manufacture starting up in Wales, i think the company was US based but probably got some tax breaks for siting in Wales, G24i or some name like that?. The G24i cells were only about 10% efficient, I seem to remember hearing normal silicon based cell are around 25%, expensive galium arsenic cells 40%? (all those figures are probably wrong). Important things you normally never see in any article, How does it work, cost comparisons, efficiency, manufacturing methods. All that is normally said in an article is the equivalent of a fart in the wind. I have absolutely no real knowledge of solar energy, but as far as my high school science tells me, probably the best way to efficiently harness energy from the sun is via the biotech route. I would think some enterprising genetic engineer could splice some n345 rna codon for chlorophyll with the Alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) zymurgation codon, culture it into a trifid type plant that directly synthesizes either ethanol or hydrogen gas. Far more efficient than the losses involved in charging batteries and much easier to store and transport, Fuel cells can then be used for electricity production or IC engines for motion. Oh yes, the photo was very poor, she should have been shown wearing a bikini (she is a chick and it is summer, oh wait she's from Australia ) Just my penny's worth of thought, you of course may have other ideas?
Soundproofing Acoustics noise
This is all fine and dandy, but I'd much rather have a pizza over powered by solar cells. =)
Any hint about the technology?
If she's just being metaphorical, she's talking about major reductions in the complexity and energy costs.
If she's speaking literally, she's talking about major reductions in facilities costs, as well. (What clean room?)
Also, she seems to be inferring significant materials cost reductions.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Now this can give me inspiration to build my Dilthium batteries. If only I can find some Lithium to use in the experiment. Then I need to find some anti-matter for the reaction.
http://www.wipo.int/pctdb/en/wo.jsp?wo=2007059578&IA=AU2006001773&DISPLAY=DESC
She's winning awards and she hasn't even made a prototype!!
So long as they give her some cash. She's in it for the money and this is yet another example of hyped vapoware.
She has no product, no prototype, nothing.
fuck maybe I should make up an idea and not have to prove it too. Global warming idiots..