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7th-Grader Designs Three Dimensional Solar Cell
Hugh Pickens writes "12-year-old William Yuan's invention of a highly-efficient, three-dimensional nanotube solar cell for visible and ultraviolet light has won him an award and a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development. 'Current solar cells are flat and can only absorb visible light'" Yuan said. 'I came up with an innovative solar cell that absorbs both visible and UV light. My project focused on finding the optimum solar cell to further increase the light absorption and efficiency and design a nanotube for light-electricity conversion efficiency.' Solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells. 'My next step is to talk to manufacturers to see if they will build a working prototype,' Yuan said. "If the design works in a real test stage, I want to find a company to manufacture and market it.""
Mod parent up.
Makes me feel stupid for spending my childhood throwing rocks at cats.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
William Yuan's bright idea to create a new, more efficient solar cell earned him top honors as Oregon's only 2008 Davidson Fellow.
As part of the honor, the 12-year-old Bethany boy will be flown to Washington, D.C., for a reception Sept. 24 at the Library of Congress where he will receive his award and a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.
"William's work was evaluated by university professors and environmental scientists," said Tacie Moessner, Davidson Fellows program manager in a call from Reno, Nev. "They look for the project's potential to benefit society and make sure it is socially relevant. Generally, the projects need to be at the graduate level."
Yuan worked on his project for the past two years with the encouragement of his science teacher Susan Duncan; support of his parents Gang Yuan and Zhiming Mei; and counsel of professional mentors Professor Chunfei Li of Portland State University's Center for Nanofabrication and Electron Microscopy, Fred Li of Applied Materials Inc. and Professor Shaofan Li of the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of California - Berkeley.
"He is our youngest fellow in science that we've ever had," Moessner said. "He is really spectacular.
"His project will really make a difference in advancing the technology of solar cells. You would never know he's 12 looking at the quality of his work."
Young talent
William Yuan is a seventh-grader in Meadow Park Middle School's Summa options program.
He is an active member of the school's Math Engineering Science Achievement (MESA) Club, First Lego League team and participant in the Science Bowl and MathCounts programs. He is also a two-time, second-place chess champion for the state.
Recognizing his interest in science, math and engineering, Yuan's science teacher encouraged him to tackle a challenging engineering project for the Northwest Science Expo after introducing him to nanotechnology and renewable energy research.
"We learned about some great energy and environmental issues," Yuan said. "To try to help, I researched the application of nanotechnology and renewable energy.
"I felt they would best complement my background knowledge and experience. After extensive research and community outreach, I wanted to work on a project to find a solution for some of the problems of the world."
Yuan decided to focus his project on finding the most efficient way to harness the sun's energy.
"I felt solar energy had large potential but it was underused," he explained. "Fossil fuels like oil, coal and natural gas are only finite and are slated to run out by 2050.
"We need to make solar energy more cost effective and efficient."
With that thought in mind, Yuan got to work.
"Current solar cells are flat and can only absorb visible light," he said. "I came up with an innovative solar cell that absorbs both visible and UV light. My project focused on finding the optimum solar cell to further increase the light absorption and efficiency and design a nanotube for light-electricity conversion efficiency."
Yuan invested countless hours in his research, seeking out new resources in the field to find a workable real-world solution.
"He has worked very hard in the past couple years," his father Gang Yuan said. "We're grateful that he had great mentors and teachers to guide him.
"When he started on his research, he had great curiosity and wanted to dig into it more. As his parents, we looked for experiences to help him."
Watching his dedication impressed William's parents.
"This generation's sense of urgency is much stronger than my generation's," his father said. "They are thinking about the future and want to know how environmental issues will impact their generation."
Promising future
Tapping into that talent and giving gifted youth the opportunity to excel is what the Davidson Institute is all about.
The national nonprofit organization recognized 20 students this year for their
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
That's what you think. Last year some 8 year olds invented wedgie-proof underwear.
From the synopsis on the Davidson Institute website, it sounds like he simulated the design with computer models but did not actually build it.
"His optimized design provides 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than the cutting-edge, three-dimensional solar cell."
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
I suppose his dad plays his chess matches and practices his Taekwondo for him too? He sounds like a genuinely extremely talented kid:
Honors/Awards
* 2008 Davidson Fellow
* 2008 Northwest Science Expo, Second Place
* 2008 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Best Engineering Project
* 2008 Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Talent Search, First Place in Oregon
State (Verbal)
* 2008 Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Talent Search, First Place in Oregon
State (Quantitative)
* 2008 High Tech Kids First Lego League First Lego League (FLL) International Open
(team), Second Place Champion\u2019s Award
* 2008 Oregon Chess for Success State Tournament, Team Championship, First Place
* 2008 Oregon Chess for Success State Tournament, Second Place
* 2007 Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth Talent Search, First Place in Oregon
State
* 2007 Intel Oregon FLL Champion\u2019s Award (team), First Place
* 2007 Oregon Chess for Success State Tournament, Team Championship, First Place
* 2007 Oregon Chess for Success State Tournament, Second Place
* 2007 World Taekwondo Headquarters: Poom Certificate
* 2006 Intel Oregon FLL State Tournament Young Team, First Place
* 2006 Oregon Chess for Success State Tournament, Team Championship, First Place
* 2005 Intel Oregon FLL Regional Tournament (team), First Place Award
* 2005 Oregon Chess for Success State Tournament (team), Second Place
I call shenanigans. Current standard solar cells are more than 0.2% efficient, so a 500x improvement would capture more energy than the sun puts out.
While this could certainly improve the energy budget, it has the minor problem that it violates the laws of physics.
According to TFA his design calls for capturing of light outside of the visible spectrum, hence the 500x increase. He's adding new sources for the energy to come from, this isn't just a reworking of current technology that only makes use of visible light.
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
If you think that's bad you should check out the $50 k scholarship recipients. My personal favorite is Philip Streich, who "designed and custom-built a unique photon-counting spectrometer, more sensitive and precise than any commercially available."
Current technology does not only make use of visible light. Efficiency is measured in terms of all incoming irradiance, which includes some UV and some Infrared.
However, there's only so much that makes it through our atmosphere. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Atmospheric_electromagnetic_transmittance_or_opacity.jpg
Your math is right, but it has nothing to do with the summary or article, which both say "500 times".
This has been already done. Read up on multi-junction solar cells: http://www.energy.gov/news/4503.htm. They basically sandwich PVs with different wavelength responses to capture a significant fraction of the solar spectrum. The record right now is 40% efficiency.
Hi. I am also a Davidson Fellow (Billy Dorminy, won $10k about two years ago, I forget the award cycle). Let me tell you: while I can't vouch for any year but the year I was a winner, the Davidson Fellow award-winners I know are fully smart enough to do such things, and while some do have scientific parents, I can say I do not have scientific parents and thus cannot have had parental help. Thus, I understand why you'd claim it's just the parents, but it's not always true and can be offensive.
Come on. Is EVERYBODY an idiot here?
Thats not true.
Its the percentage of the whole solar spectrum, including UV and IR. And its not 10%, but >20% even for moderately priced solar cells (high end is 40%).
The article is plain bullshit.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
A bit premature, aren't you? He could go and try to get the thing manufactured, and find out that it doesn't work because of some effect his models don't take into account, or that it cannot be manufactured with currently known techniques. Right now it's just paper, not practice.
wat
The sun approximates to a black body (pretty well)
At around 6000K most of the energy is going to be visible and IR.
That will be above the atmosphere. I've no idea what proportion of each wavelength gets through the atmosphere but I know that UV is mostly blocked (and a good job too - that was one of the worries about ozone depletion)
Tim.
p.s. Just found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation
The spectrum of the Sun's solar radiation is close to that of a black body with a temperature of about 5,800 K. About half that lies in the visible short-wave part of the electromagnetic spectrum and the other half mostly in the near-infrared part. Some also lies in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum.[1] When ultraviolet radiation is not absorbed by the atmosphere or other protective coating, it can cause a change in human skin pigmentation.
God said, "div D = rho, div B = 0, curl E = -@B/@t, curl H = J + @D/@t," and there was light.
what about these guys?
They have been researching (and producing) cells like this for years; anyone see how they are different?
Sometimes, life itself is sarcasm...
> 1) This absorbs both visible and UV light. Let's assume that's a factor of 2 improvement.
> 2) Although TFA fails to mention it, his cell is very large with ~250x the surface area of a traditional cell.
No, solar cells are typically judged based on the percentage of the energy hitting them that comes out the leads as usable electrical energy. Current cells already convery double digit percentages of the total energy hitting their surface so a 500x increase just isn't possible. But this is the eternal dream of the solar nuts that pops up on slashdot like clockwork every week or two, that some tech miracle will let us put solar cells on our roof and then we can do away with all that carbon based economy stuff because not only can we power our homes we can charge our tiny little scooters we will now call cars. Not happening, and anyone who can do math knows it because the energy density on a rooftop isn't enough, even with 100% efficiency which isn't going to be approached in our lifetime.
If you want to end the carbon economy and stop sending Sagan's of cash to people who want to cut our heads off there is only one short term solution. We need an Apollo type national commitment to building Nuke plants. Second we need to divert every research dollar available to fusion. And I mean EVERY available dollar. Freeze every other research at 75% of current dollars, AIDS, green tech, EVERYTHING included and start ramping up research on fusion just as fast as the projects can get vetted and construction underway. The only other research priority would be batteries. We know everything else about making a practical all electric vehicle.
Democrat delenda est
Solar cell efficiency is generally given as "energy conversion efficiency", which means how much of the total incoming solar energy is converted into electrical energy. Thus, it already includes the entire spectrum.
The best current lab cells are around 42.8% efficient according to Wikipedia (citing a University of Delaware press release).
So the theoretical maximum improvement is a little over 2x assuming perfect conversion.
They are very common, you can buy a 47.5% efficiency cell from most of the major solar cell companies (mainly boeing or emcore now that tecstar went under) that will work with up to 1000suns of light on it (ie, you can put a big fresnel lens on top of the cell and and it will be just as efficient gathering 1000x as much energy from a given cell area)
These cells are actually 3 solar cells grown on top of eachother (perhaps that is what he means be '3D'?), one made of germanium, one of silicon, and one of gallium arsenide, each which absorbs a different part of the spectrum (germanium UV, silicon most of the visible, and GaAs blue and uv).
These cells are being mass produced as I type this; boeing is building a 10MW plant out in the dessert that should be done in the next few years.
The quote to get even a paltry 9x from current cells would put the efficiency at almost 500x; which is impossible. The quote to get a 500x improvement over existing cells might be true about some of the polymer cells, but no one was planning to use those for real energy generation anyway.
In short, all of the info about solar technology I have read thus far is misleading, if not completely made up or horribly outdated. Says a lot of about what was done during those countless hours of research when even wikipedia quotes 40+ percent efficiencies...
Swirly in a urinal? You're doing it wrong.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?
Both of his parents are engineers at Intel. And he has some mentors "including a California engineer, professors at Portland State University and the University of California-Berkeley".
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
if he could hammer an 8" spike through a board. Then he would have GF galore.
Not sure what that means, but I guarantee you that won't get you the kind of quantity and quality of cootch that millions of dollars of play money can. If that kid plays his cards right he could have said millions and will be drowning in top shelf snatch.
Here is comes, the excuse one why the smart innovative kids aren't really all that so somebody can feel better about themselves
Can I believe it having gone to a shiny magnet (US world news #20) high school and then honor's program deal? The overachievers aren't any different from anyone else, often just more neurotic. Some really are brilliant and some are overcompensating idiots.
I disagree with the parent that:
Without their parents to drive them, they went nuts (sometimes literally).
because for me (and plenty of others) we're motivated enough that parental interference does more harm than good. Most of the kid's I know have very hands off parents (hell, a few have parent's who weren't even in the city/state/country) and it doesn't matter. I'm burned out, but I take on the type of killer workload that would burn out anyone. My friends who are saner are doing just fine.
I think William Yuan's work is awesome and hope he lands in schools/programs that can push him further, but he seems like the type of kid who'll do okay where ever so long as he stays on track (which really doesn't have anything to with brains far as I've seen.) This kid's got killer potential.
open source modern art: laser taggi
In skimming TFA I didn't see anything about the kid's patent.
His parents are engineers at Intel. Besides them he has other engineers and professors who mentor him.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
You don't need an A-list school to build up your networking contacts. Internships, co-ops, clubs, and conferences are your best tools for networking. You're going to make a lot more networking contacts if you are on the solar car team at the University of Alabama than if you just go to class and don't do any extracurricular work at Cal Tech.
No high schoolers need to be told get involved in something no matter what school you go to. You'll make more and more meaningful contacts if you get involved in a project, research, or something outside of the classroom no matter what school you go to.
The question I would ask you, is what did you do besides go to class while you were in school? Did you apply for internships, or more importantly co-ops? Did you search for opportunities that let you network?
If you go to a decent state school you should have a number of opportunities for real world and academic networking. Early on in school spent my free time volunteering on projects doing whatever worthless junk I could - cataloging and archiving satellite photos from a NASA mission was a long, boring job that requires no skill or education. A friend of mine got his start helping sort parts for a robotics project and carrying junk across campus. What mattered was literally being in the room with the people I needed to network with. Eventually as my education built up to match my interests, I had the inside track to work on funded projects that sent me to various conferences and got my name out. When it came time, I didn't have to use my network to find a job, there were already people who were just waiting for me to graduate.
Alternatively as another poster said, go to a high class graduate school. Where you go to for undergraduate work isn't as important as where you go for grad school, simply because grad school is more about doing research and getting funded than learning the basics.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Actually, it helps if you get the original pdf and take the quote in context. http://presskit.ditd.org/2008_Davidson_Fellows_Press_Kit/2008_DF_William_Yuan.pdf
"In his project, "A Highly-Efficient 3-Dimensional Nanotube Solar Cell for Visible and UV
Light," William invented a novel solar panel that enables light absorption from visible to
ultraviolet light. He designed carbon nanotubes to overcome the barriers of electron
movement, doubling the light-electricity conversion efficiency. William also developed a
model for solar towers and a computer program to simulate and optimize the tower
parameters. His optimized design provides 500 times more light absorption than
commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than the cutting-edge, three-
dimensional solar cell."
double the efficiency of current cells that means 30-40% efficient cells and then, in a SOLAR TOWER with millions(or at least thousands) of slightly curved mirrors concentrating the solar power that is were we get the five hundred times, 9 times figure. there is a big difference between a giant tower surrounded by sun tracking mirrors, and a single solar cell on the top of your roof, and yeah its easy to get 500 times as much energy by concentrating thousands of times the energy in a single point.
oh and just so you realize, he just designed and tested computer models. there is no real silicon nanotubes or whatever being built and tested to confirm the gains, it's all based on data fed into a computer and modeled... of course, one would think the judges of the contest he took second place in would be able to tell something that is ludicrous from something that the computer at least says is right.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
And all those people who say that cats always land on their feet... they just aren't throwing them right.
The trick is to first saw their legs off with a bread knife.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.