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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..."
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?
MacGyver would have done it with just the nail polish.
Heaven forbid anyone seek financial benefit for their innovations...
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.
Just because you patent it that doesn't mean you have to charge an arm and a leg for it. Some people simply get a patent so others can't steal their idea. Say some gready corp who says hey this is cheap and effective and we can make a fortune even if we up the cost 5000% or more.
She's a PhD student -- she probably didn't have any choice in the matter, as the patent is probably held by the university.
now we just need to figure out how to get every poor country an abundance of pizza ovens, nail polish and inkjet printers
That's perfectly fine, actually, just as long as you don't claim to be doing everything for the sake of the poorest people on the planet. That's a contradiction.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
The term 'feminazis' is sexist and demeaning. We demand to be called pro-female Fascists. From hereon in anyone who utters that degrading neologism will be executed without trial by way of snoo-snoo.
Pig.
Well, fair enough, but she can stop playing the "For the good of all mankind" card, which is probably what caused her to win at least one of the awards.
-- All your booze are belong to us.
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.
Nah. In that case she would have been a crafty sheila.
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)
"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."
I wish I could spend mod points to send an electric shock to especially bad posters.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
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
"C'mon, Taco. Join the fucking twenty-first century."
Does that mean I can't use the term 'dude' anymore? It's just so 1800's.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
You know, it would be a lot more likely for people like Taco to catch on if there weren't plenty of women even in tech circles with "Chick" in their username. Hell, what about DevChix who actually complain about sexism a fair bit?
Just because you find it demeaning, it doesn't mean all women do. Some women happily self-identify as "chicks".
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.
Hey, dude, I know a lot of really smart chicks. Some chicks I know are even nerds. So don't get your panties in a twist, babe.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why? Let's say she didn't patent it, just released it to public domain. At the moment, the cells she has can be made inexpensively, out of cheap components. What happens when GreedyDeepPockets Corp decides to get into the business? It drives the cost UP, for everyone (for the raw materials at least). Now, let's say she does have a patent. She can decide who can produce it. Maybe she makes license terms that say for the first 5 years it can only be used to provide electricity for people who don't currently have it. Try not to get your panties in a knot every time you see the word 'patent'.
C'mon, EWAdams. You are really only person here who didn't noticed this "scientist" is damn hot chick? Why is it bad? If there was Usain Bolt baking solar cells instead of her, would it be also not correct to mention this guy is scientist *and* very fast, I mean "lets just keep on subject, his above-average physical abilities are not limitation of any kind in science and we should never mention it in 21. century!"
839*929
"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.
Dude!
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Why? Let's say she didn't patent it, just released it to public domain. At the moment, the cells she has can be made inexpensively, out of cheap components. What happens when GreedyDeepPockets Corp decides to get into the business? It drives the cost UP, for everyone (for the raw materials at least).
Right. The big evil corporation is going to make these things at 10 times the price. Hmm... how will they get people to buy when the people could just make their own. I know... they're going to corner the market on pizza ovens and nail polish.
Now, let's say she does have a patent. She can decide who can produce it. Maybe she makes license terms that say for the first 5 years it can only be used to provide electricity for people who don't currently have it.
Right. That's going to get those big businesses to make the things and sell them for dirt, to people who have nothing but dirt.
Try not to get your panties in a knot every time you see the word 'patent'.
There are three utilities for a patent.
Using it to set up a monopolistic business and pricing the device higher than Cost+ReasonableProfit.
Selling it to an existing business so they can do so.
Patent trolling, supporting a leisurely lifestyle by placing a perpetual tax on those who would like to bring these devices to the citizenry of the world without continuing to productively participate in society.
This is an assault on the worlds poor. Plain and simple. The sort of thing you see in a world that is based on the rule of law, rather than the willing co-operation of free men and women. It's scummy, all the more so because it's being presented as the antithesis of what it actually is.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Join the fucking twenty-first century.
This might sound like nitpicking, but people seeing women as equal to men isn't a "twenty-first century" concept. In fact, 2400 years ago Plato was already defending that, for example, if a woman is capable of governing a state, she should be allowed to, not blocked because of her sex.
We should stop being chronocentrists, which is as much a discriminatory state of mind as ethnocentrism. A given year, or a collection of years, has no attached value. Something happening "in the 21st century" isn't better just because it's happening "after" whatever came before. Ideas, such as that women and men must have equal rights, must be judged in themselves, not because of when they appeared, or when they became mainstream, or when they stopped being mainstream, or whatever.
So, while I agree with your sentiment, I must disagree with the way you express it. Calling for someone to change his behavior because of the "age" or "era" in which he lives is to incur in the "appeal to authority" fallacy. In fact, the only intellectually correct approach is to defend an idea by its own merits, not dwelling into its "ageity" at all.
Do more, or less, than this, and what you'll be doing won't be a rational defense of an idea, but merely a rhetorical one. In other words, politics, not reason.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
This is why they are dangerous. Kids might grow up and invent something.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't think Outback Steakhouse would lie to me about this.
Sweet!
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
There are three utilities for a patent.
Using it to set up a monopolistic business and pricing the device higher than Cost+ReasonableProfit.
Selling it to an existing business so they can do so.
Patent trolling, supporting a leisurely lifestyle by placing a perpetual tax on those who would like to bring these devices to the citizenry of the world without continuing to productively participate in society.
Four: Keeping a big, greedy, monopolistic company (or patent troll) from patenting the design first, thus forcing everyone to pay.
Not every patent-holder is evil, and not every company that sells something is trying to rob you. Only most of them.
Seriously, if death by snoo-snoo is the punishment... well, I've never used the word 'feminazi' before, but I may have to start.
Do we get to select our own executioner? Anything else would be inhumane!
This is an assault on the worlds poor. Plain and simple. The sort of thing you see in a world that is based on the rule of law, rather than the willing co-operation of free men and women. It's scummy, all the more so because it's being presented as the antithesis of what it actually is.
I actually agree. It reminds me of the OLPC project. WHY do ONLY the poor kids(people) of the world deserve cheap things? On what planet does this make sense? Shouldn't an innovation like this be made available to everyone as equally as possible?
My own kids can only be considered 'poor' if I quit my job. This does not mean that they automagically get solar cells and laptops at birth. What, exactly, is the source of the disconnect?
I guess this is what I'd like someone to explain: Why do the poor somehow deserve better than the non-poor? Whatever happened to the notion of 'same'?
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.
Information on the patent
Information on the "applicant" (owner?): NewSouth Innovations Pty
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Got Paranoia?
A patent helps her to be able to control her vision.
What if she was to license some big corporation and use the proceeds to fund her own humanitarian projects?
You have no clue what she will do with that patent. Also, you should also consider that most places bind employees, students, and professors to allow the company/university to patent discoveries. It could very easily be that for her to not cooperate in the patent process could make her legally liable for damages to the university where she is a student.
I know that everywhere I have either been a graduate student or been employed, there have been contracts regarding patentable ideas and how they are handled, what cooperation is required, and how royalties (if any) will be divided.
You need to give this gal a break until you actually see her do something evil. The fact that she has a patent probably only means she fulfilled her legal obligation to the university.
And you call this woman a girl? That's much better.
Four: Keeping a big, greedy, monopolistic company (or patent troll) from patenting the design first, thus forcing everyone to pay.
That is bullshit. If you want to prevent someone from patenting your creation after the fact, you release it wide and far without encumbrance. The fact that you have publicly released prior art prevents them from getting a patent, or overturns that patent should it pass through the patent office. Patents do not protect citizens from patents. Your argument is utter nonsense.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I'd like to get a Silicon Diavolo with garlic and Mozzarella please.
Get back in the kitchen and cook me a solar cell!
It would be nice if the article told us how it works ... if she has a way to get past transparent conductive oxide layers I would certainly be interested in hearing about it. Zinc Oxide deposition onto glass substrates is used for the black currant solar cell.
I like how that technique is being heralded by a company named Mansolar....
Well - reading the fucking article again, I did notice this ...
"While it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology"
Am I being an asshole for pointing out the irony of wanting to commercialize DIY solar cell technology?
""I love working with passionate people who want to help address climate change and poverty by thinking and experimenting outside the square," she said."
That reminds me of an episode of Pinky and the Brain. Something about Brain wanting to take over the world for the good of all man kind, and chanting kumbaya with a bunch of hippies... :-)
And are they talking about an electric pizza oven or a brick oven pizza oven? I imagine one would be depositing carbon all over the place ... which could help in some cases. The black currant technique requires a layer of graphite to be applied for the anode I think...
Your resident /. manarchist,
afxgrin
These are the people who don't realise that the IP agreement they're signing means that the University now owns their thoughts, dreams and lives.
I'm a postgrad student at an Australian university. One uni pressured me to assign my IP rights to them for spurious reasons involving the fact that my research was partly sponsored by an industry partner. This included granting the uni the right to withhold my research from publication! The only guarantee for me was that my PhD thesis would be "published" - even if that meant it would remain "behind the counter" at the library and hence not publicly available for (I think) two years. WTF!?
I tried to re-negotiate the terms so that the uni granted me a non-exclusive perpetual licence to my own research so that I could, for instance, work on it as a postdoc or maybe write a book down the track. No dice.
Then they tried to make it a condition of my scholarship. Fortunately, I'd already started so there was little they could do when I just refused to sign.
For other reasons, I left that uni and went to another one in the same city. Not a problem there.
Unbelievable. Still, at some level you have to admire the pure gall of it.
In the case of the OLPC project, the poor get the computer first because for them, it allows them first time access to a software platform and the internet. For you, on the other hand, an OLPC laptop would just sit in your bathroom and display pr0n.
How the hell does that work?
You're assuming that poor people would not likewise consume porn, were it available? Based on WHAT, exactly?
Likewise, you're assuming that non-poor would get NO educational value from such a device?
Beyond a weird sense of reverse-prejudice, what on earth is backing this assumption up?
As thePig said, patents are a good way to prevent a large company from putting your small company out of business. Most people interested in doing good for their community (or the world) can't make enough money from their product to out-produce a massive corporation; if they want to keep making money, they have to have a tool to prevent big businesses from immediately competing.
Sure... if you release it for free they can't patent it, but they can sure offer your widget at a lower price... right up until you've gone under, at which point they can -- and will -- raise the price again. Show me some proof that things can't work as I say, and I'll accept your argument. Until then, just keep telling me it's bullshit, and I'll keep thinking you're wrong.
Female is also sexist, as it is a term applied to a single sex. As it dude, man, woman, lady.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Foster's: Canadian for Australian Beer.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
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.
I suppose calling males 'guys' or 'dudes' is also sexist, then?
Seriously, some people are way over-fucking-sensitive. Probably not yourself.. but the people that decide on what's "politically correct" should be sent to mental asylums, or perhaps become antagonists in a Jane Austen theatre production.
which is totally what she said
Sorry dude, the feminine form of the word to "chick" is "dude".
Okay.
The famine form of the word "guy" is "gal", which is rarely used because "gal" sounds akward.
"famine"? "akward"? As for the awkwardness of gal, speak for yourself. I like it just fine, and none of my gal friends complain about it.
The feminine form of the word "bitch" is "asshole".
Bitch is a feminine noun. It means female dog. However, I would offer "prick" as the term for opposite gender if we mean to stick to insulting humans. An asshole can be any gender, as both have them.
The feminine form of the word "beefcake" is "cheesecake", and the feminine form of the word "stud" is "slut" or "ho".
Slut or whore ("ho") would most likely be the feminine counterpart to "gigolo". A feminine counterpart to "stud"? "Bitch" for dogs, "mare" for horses. Humans? I don't know... I'd probably go with "babe".
It would be nice if people would learn a language before whining about it.
Words to live by; too bad you don't.
"Ayn Rand is a bloody socialist compared to me." - Robert A. Heinlein
So... most of those were, at one point, under patent. Once the patent protection ends, other drug companies can come in and duplicate the formula. That's the way the patent system is SUPPOSED to work. The fact is, it does work right sometimes. But the fact that it sometimes works right doesn't mean it always will. And the companies that are manufacturing the generics aren't the ones who developed them, which pretty much means your example has nothing to do with the matter at hand.
The spirit is willing, but the flesh is spongy, and bruised
True. There are many areas where solar isn't a good option, and solar probably won't be used for base load for several decades in the future.
True. More people die from pollution than have ever died from radiation poisoning, and both plants and animals are flourishing in the Chernobyl fall-out area.
Almost true. I'd love to see Stirling Radioisotope Generators (SRG) installed every few city blocks large enough to handle base load. Alpha emitters aren't the "dangerous" type of radiation like the Gamma emitters everyone is familiar with, and doesn't even require any special radiation shielding. They're maintenance-free for decades at a time, so you install them in an ultra-massive concrete casing if you like, or perhaps just bury them a hundred feet down, and let them do their thing.
In fact, what I'd really like is an SRG in my electric motor home, so that I never need any gasoline or grid electricity for my lifetime, and could drive endlessly, and just decide to park and live absolutely anywhere I feel like. Honestly, how expensive is food? If you didn't have to pay for rent, electricity, gasoline, etc., how many years would you have to work to save up enough money to feed yourself for the rest of your life?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
There is no reason why we all can't have safe little nuclear power plants in our backyard, today.
Actually, there is. Inspired by your post, I called up Backyard Atomics Inc. and asked them if I could get a nuclear plant in my backyard today. They said no, it takes 3-5 days for shipping. So already I was disappointed. Then I decided to see if you were at least partly right, and asked if they would get plants to everyone in 3-5 days. They said no, that would require their full production capacity through at least next February.
So I appreciate the spirit of your post, but please get your facts right next time. It's either "There is no reason why some of us can't have safe little nuclear power plants in our backyard, next week" or "There is no reason we all can't have safe little nuclear power plants in our backyard, next year."
The enemies of Democracy are
Maybe not being an a-hole, but history shows that if something is truly DIY, the patent system doesn't impose a barrier to doing it yourself, just to doing it and selling it. See the history of the cotton gin for what I'm talking about.
I suspect that they see the business as making the varnish/dye/ink being used, and kits, which does make sense if selling that is economical, and in a few decades the original patent expires, though I'm sure there will be updates.
-Peter
== Just my opinion(s)
Completely off topic, but reminds me of something I noticed with some friends at a Japanese restaurant - one ordered a Sapporo, one ordered an Asahi, and both discovered they were actually drinking Canadian (I ordered some Sho Chiku Bai Nigori unfiltered sake, made in the traditional location - Berkeley).
Here are more details:
A typical photovoltaic cell is made of a thin boron doped P-type (P for positive) silicon wafer with positively charged 'holes' (missing electrons). [...] Metal contact is made to both the P and N-type silicon allowing electrons to flow out of the N-type silicon [...]
Unfortunately photovoltaic cells are expensive to produce, as you traditionally need access to elaborate, clean' manufacturing plants [...]
Nicole has spent the last two years researching an alternative manufacturing process [...] Using Inkjet printing, aluminium spray and a pizza oven, Nicole has created metal contacts to both the negative and positive sections of a solar 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!
from http://www.amonline.net.au/eureka/index.cfm?objectid=A4D69CF1-9890-B67D-2409EF3BFCD8F038&DISPLAYENTRY=true
I assumed that producing ultra-pure silicon wafers was the most expensive part about making solar cells, but I guess this would also help.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
From hereon in anyone who utters that degrading neologism will be executed without trial by way of snoo-snoo.
I never thought it would end this way. But I always really hoped.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
"[...] 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!
AHHAHAhhahahahaaaaaa.
I know what's going on. The above is "dumbed down" for the reporter, who has reported it "faithfully" - and now everyone is assuming she *actually* used nail polish, an inkjet printer, and a pizza oven. She didn't use ANY of those. She used a full blow IC Fab - the above sounds exactly like a regular old wafer etch step, just with metal instead of silicon and an "inket LIKE" application of the photoresist before the acid etch!
Ahhahhahahahaa. (wipes tear) You Loosers.
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.