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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.""
Daddy wanted press, so he had little Billy say he came up with it.
If his idea works as well stated in the article, the guy deserves more than "a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development." The fact that it's a seventh grader makes it even more astounding.
Proudly supporting the Libertarian Party.
being a jealous curmudgeonly skeptic, i have to ask: what are the careers of his parents?
i tend to observe suspicious correlations between kids that win science fairs and kids with parents that are scientists or engineers.
> So does anyone know what 3d shape he used to achieve a 500x efficiency gain?
Since solar cells passed .5% with the first one, unless this kid attends Hogwarts this story is just this week's solar snake oil.
Democrat delenda est
If his idea works as well stated in the article, the guy deserves more than "a $25,000 scholarship from the Davidson Institute for Talent Development."
Oh yeah. And if he doesn't get a real return on this while patent trolls are sucking blood out of industry, there's something very wrong.
If it's his invention and it does what it says he does, this is exactly the kind of thing the enterprise system should reward generously.
Tweet, tweet.
Parents help with homework all the time. His mom or dad actually did it for him. It's the only explanation. Way to go, Dad. You just saved $25k on college expenses for your little angel.
Is most of slashdot really that petty? His parents most likely helped in the same sense a professor will help his Ph.D. student, but it's not really that hard to believe that the kid did all the research himself. There's nothing a seventh grader can't do that a 30-year-old can't, except for the lack of knowledge. If it's an intelligent kid that has been surrounded by the material all his life, he has the knowledge part down.
Remember. Mozart was composing better stuff than his dad by the time he was 5. His dad was a musician and that was essential to expose the kid early to music, but geniuses tend to demonstrate their abilities quite early on.
You can't absorb more light than is there.
I'm not doubting that this is an idea with merit, but IIRC current PV cells are about 10% efficient, recent one being rather better. I can conceive (although I'd be skeptical) of a cell that captures 500% of the energy that similarly priced cells do, which would amount to 50% efficiency. That's seems almost too good to be true, but not nearly as impossible as getting 50x more energy out than the Sun puts in.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It sounds to me like there is no actual solar cell, as of yet. Rather, he did some paper design work that demonstrated the capturing of extra energy in previously unused parts of the light spectrum, by way of nanotubes.
While I wish him the best of luck, the smart money is on this design proving completely implausible when it comes time to actually fabricate even a prototype.
Doesn't anyone at local newspapers do fact checking? If today's solar cells run at 5 to 19% efficiency, then that make "500x as efficient" 2500% to 9500%. Sheesh. Anything to grab the reader's attention.
So TFAbstract suggests that conventional solar cells absorb less then 0.2% of the available light? I call big BS on that, it is not even energy conversion, just absorbtion. So his new toy may only be getting hot in the sun, not doing anything usefull.
Now on to the article itself, see if it was only the submitter or more that did not grasp physics.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
Way to go, Dad. You just saved $25k on college expenses for your little angel.
So nowadays that's what, like one semester minus books?
I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
A 500% increase is a five-fold increase. Not five-hundred fold.
i lost to a chick who was performing live open heart surgery on rats
i didn't feel inadequate: my parents weren't high ranking research scientists who could get the authorization to let their children have the run of the university research facilities on weekends
and who i knows how much else her parents guided her through
its far more impressive to build an aerodynamic soap box derby car out of balsa wood than it is to turn the ignition on your dad's cessna
well, in terms of personal achievement that is
i'm not saying i'd rather play with balsa wood than a cessna ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Looks like someone can't spell "jealous". Never mind though, the correct word is envy.
You know telescopes were invented by a couple of kids playing with lenses their dad had given them(he was a lens maker). Also I understand the 3D ultrasound was invented by a young man also. If I have the story right, his Dad was a doctor and complained one time that it was so annoying that Ultrasounds have these hard to interpret 2D type images and wished there was some software to turn it 3D. Turns out the kid had software that does just that on his PC at home. So he didn't invent Ultrasound or 3D translation algorithms, he just put two technologies he knew about together.
The point here is not that these kid's accomplishments are not praiseworthy, they most certainly ARE! The point is we are beginning to see the true impact of the information age. There are an amazing amount of things to invent, if you just put together two or three things we already know. And the next generation, so familiar with the Internet, will start doing this on a routing basis since no one told them it couldn't be done.
Is anybody else feeling really inadequate right now?
It is nothing but our own pride that insists that we are either the best in the world, or completely worthless.
There is a huge sliding grayscale of worthiness in the intellectual/industriousness domain.
The world needs a rich supply of people spread across that middle range.
In fact...the world needs the middlers more than it needs the geniuses. Given enough time the middlers can eventually get there on their own; the geniuses just accelerate the process a bit.
Once in a while a genius will do something that no number of middlers could ever have accomplished...which is nice...but once the genius has done it, the rest of us can follow suit. So, while we may need the occasional genius, we really don't need very many of them...whereas large numbers of middlers are the foundation of stable technological progress.
Drop the superego. Learn the value of who you already are, and be proud of it.
That line puzzled me, too. Current (silicon) photovoltaic cells are 10%-20% efficient. The barriers to higher efficiency aren't light absorbtion - just look at how dark a solar panel it, not much light is escaping it - but from the semiconductor fundamentals at work.
Still, 10%-20% ain't bad. But how can you improve that 500-fold?
I don't want to drag on the kid's accomplishments, because there is probably something real there. If anything, I blame shoddy science journalism that has a lot of quotes from bystanders but essentially no real information.
If you think that's bad you should check out the $50 k scholarship recipients ...
How much college does that cover these days, a little over a semester?
The article says he "designed" a carbon nanotube. Unless his design happens to match an easy-to-manufacture randomly-oriented blob of short carbon chain cylinders, it's not going to get very far. you can't just pick up carbon atoms and place them here and there like they were cinder blocks to match your custom design.
also i suspect that even if he is very, very bright, the properties (electrical, photonic) of his carbon nanotube design may not actually match his expectations. The use and applications of nanotubes is still kind of unusual and their properties are not as predictable a priori, as compared to silicon, for example.
nope cant blame gaming. I wasted a lot of hours on my Atari but I also designed and built things.
The difference between a dreamer and a engineer is that the dreamer draws things in class. The engineer draws things in class and builds them.
I had a jr high teacher tell my dad I was a failure because I drew nonsense in his classes. My dad looked at the drawings he took from me and said.." that failure designed and built that doodle in my garage. he learned how to bend steel and weld a sidecar frame and attached it to his dirtbike all on his own."
Note: sidecar on dirtbike while a neat concept is actually a BAD idea. I still feel the pain in my legs from that one.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Not really. Probably, his father is a research scientist in the field.
There was an article in the LA Times about how parents were using their contacts with research labs to get resources for their kids science fair project competitions - parents would do things like (a hypothetical example) getting a time-slot allocated on a supercomputer to run CFD simulations to design a turbine to capture energy from water running down a drain-pipe. Organisers of such events eventually made the restriction on the types of resources that could be used.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Waterless urinals.
Before commenting on the Bible, please read it first
Let's hope he patents this & manufactures them so we can get these solar cells.
Chances are, however, he'll just sell the idea for a lot of money to OPEC; the invention will get burried; and it will never see the sun again.
Who needs an expensive college? Attend a cheap state school, use the leftover "living expense" money to start your own company.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Yes. Most of slashdot will not make it out of junior college. Here's an excellent copied-and-pasted description of the "crab bucket mentality" that plagues slashlosers:
Anyone familiar with the behaviour of a bunch of crabs trapped at the bottom of a bucket will know what happens when one of them tries to climb to the top; instead of attempting the climb themselves, those left at the bottom of the bucket will do all in their collective power to drag the climber back down.
This is why anything cool or interesting that winds up on the front page gets second-guessed and nitpicked to death by an army of geeky nobodies- pasty, pudgy, goateed cubicle shit who will never amount to anything.
Listen p*ssy. I'm sure your the same homo that posted earlier about alf's boner and you just want to remain anonymous fo
> his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption
Bogus alert! BWEEEP BWEEEP! Bogus alert!
Quantum efficiency of current silicon-based cells in most of the visible light range is on the order of 90%. Look it up. (here, be lazy http://pvcdrom.pveducation.org/CELLOPER/QUANTUM.HTM)
To satisfy your curiosity, the reason the very best silicon-based cells have about 22% _electrical_efficiency_ in spite of capturing 90% or more of the incoming light is due to a wide variety of reasons, including:
1) re-radiating of the energy in the IR
2) electron mobility issues, getting trapped at impurities and such
3) recombination, where the ejected electron finds another hole before flowing out of the circuit - this becomes more of an issue for shorter wavelengths (blue, violet, UV)
4) not making it to a conductor on the surface; you can add more conductor but that blocks more light.
5) The #1 reason is that a single bandgap, like in a normal solar cell, can only extract a single amount of energy out of the photoelectrons. For silicon the cutoff is in the red. That means that the extra energy in blue light (or green, yellow, and especially UV) is wasted, turning into heat. You can tune the bandgap up to get more of that energy, but that means you can no longer capture the long-wavelengths and all of that energy down there is lost. It's a catch-22.
So adding "500 times" the absorption is, obviously, impossible. Now its possible this is 500x in the UV, but surface recombination wipes that out anyway. To solve THAT you have to use multi-junction cells. They're in production already, but extremely expensive. So again...
Bogus alert! BWEEEP BWEEEP! Bogus alert!
Maury
OK, there's a crap-ton of people making this same observation, so I'll reply to the first: Current solar cells absorb light in the visible spectrum. Commercially available solar cells range from 5%-19% efficiency. The best research cells are running at about 40% efficiency, again with only visible light. This kid's solar cell adds UV light to the mix. The UV spectrum is much broader and more energetic than the visible spectrum, so a 500x gain over current commercially available PV cells (note, they don't claim 500x better than the *best* commercially available PV cells) is plausible. I think the kid is more likely to have attended the Tesla School than Hogwarts.
The Russian Mafia will mod you down just to see if the Moderate button works.
Q: Are you smarter than a 7th grader?
A: Most likely not this one.
How is it that one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?
At this point (according to one of TFAs, the other is slashdotted) it looks like he hasn't built anything. He's only done some modeling. Now he's looking for somebody to build a prototype and see if the real world behaves like the model.
And if it doesn't it's not his fault - it's the tool's.
So your question should be "How do people that young get access to tools to model these things?"
Answer: Good schools, good teachers, and maybe a corporate grant program.
Any bets on whether Meadow Park Middle School is a government-run public school?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm 23 and play Pokemon you insensitive clod.
That's why he designs 3D solar cells, and you don't
The EM spectrum doesn't have ends; it makes no sense to speak of something converting "1% of the EM Spectrum". Sunlight is, to a decent approximation, a black-body spectrum at about 5778 K. Of the total radiant power, about 12% lies in the ultraviolet (wavelengths shorter than 400nm), about 37% is visible, and about 51% is infrared (wavelengths longer than 700nm). At the distance of Earth's orbit, before any absorption by the atmosphere, it has a power density of about 1,367 W/m^2 (this varies depending on the time of year due to Earth's orbital eccentricity).
A given solar cell will be able to convert a certain proportion of incident radiation to electrical power; this efficiency in general will vary as a function of the wavelength, so the total power produced will be the integral over the entire spectrum of that efficiency multiplied by the incident power at that wavelength. Thus, the efficiency may depend somewhat on the spectrum used. For real-world solar cells, efficiency varies from around 6% or so for the cheap ones in calculators and such up to 19% for high-end commercially available systems, and 40% for cutting-edge materials in the laboratory.
In brief, the claim that the technology referred to in the article can achieve a 500x efficiency improvement over existing solar cells is flagrantly incompatible with the first law of thermodynamics.
Insightful is the new funny?
There isn't anything he did that can't be done with a home PC and some research, and the smarts to apply them in the correct manner.
The smarts being the important part, and looking at this 12 year olds list of achievements is a good sign he is smart and motivated enough to do this, IMHO.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You can thank the Daily Show for that.
This is not good advice. This is the advice I was given (well, not the "leftover money" bit--who has leftover money in college?), and compared to my friends who didn't take it and went to expensive schools, things have been a lot harder for me.
I teach university now, and let me tell you, after many years of being in college and several years on a faculty, how college works:
The point is not the classes per se. It is very true that, education-wise, just about any decent school is going to be the same there. Learning (and I say this as a teacher) is a lot more about what you do than it is about what the teacher does. About all I can do as a teacher is hone, year after year, my tricks for explaining things. But these tricks come up like once or twice a semester. I can also do my best to choose materials that are going to give you the opportunity to learn. That's the trick of course design (and to be honest, I'm not very good at it--I let the people who are design my syllabi and just make tweaks for personal preference--mine or the students). If the point of college was to learn, the mystique of places like Harvard or Oxford or whatever would have gone away long ago.
No, here's the real point of university: networking. And brand recognition.
I had a friend who went to Harvard. His classes did not seem any different or better than mine at a cheap state university (Go Rams!). However, that guy walked out of Harvard into a job at MSNBC. I walked out and... Couldn't find a job for a few months... Then got a short-term job... Then crashed... Then had to go to grad school so I could get a job... Then got a short-term uni job... And now I'm getting another.
Could I have done his job? Yeah, of course. But what got him there was the name value of Harvard and the contacts the school has. That, my friends, is worth the money.
See, I believe that the "if you go to college, you'll get a better job" thing is a total anachronism. Back in the old days, only the super-wealthy or super-smart could go. So if you were a middle-class or poor kid who proved himself and got in with all these rich contacts, of course you got a good job. You were Dickie Jr.'s roommate from college. Dickie spent the rest of his life sportfishing and snorting cocaine off of debutantes, but you got a well-paying and interesting lifelong job.
This isn't the case when everyone goes, or if you go to a cheaper/smaller/less-famous place. You don't meet Dickie Jr.; you meet Dirk, the kid from Grand Island, NE, who likes Purple Passion and Lynyrd Skynyrd. You don't have a contact with the owner of National Widget; you have a contact with the owner of Dirk Sr.'s feedlot.
I got a great education, no doubt about that. But the contacts have been very hard to build from scratch. People can cry "cronyism," but let's be honest: if you were looking for a person with X skillset, and your son was close with someone who had that skillset, would you take a chance on a stranger or take the guy or girl you know? Most people want a safe bet more than anything, so they go with the safe choice: a known value.
Now, I'm not even saying it has to be one of these A-list schools, necessarily, but you need to make sure that the department you are getting into is well-respected. My big, cheap state university is well-respected and well-connected in a number of fields. But I wasn't in them.
This is what high schoolers should be told. Go for the most famous school you can get into, even if you have to go into major debt. You will probably go into debt regardless, at least if you go somewhere expensive you'll have a job to pay that debt off.
If you're reading this and you're in a relatively unknown school: You can still build a network, but you're going to have to do it by hand. Get out there and start doing those damn internships, unpaid or not. I didn't understand why I should go to work for no money, especially when my grades were so good
The key is large rocks and properly accelerating the cats.
If you pick a big enough rock, the problem of accelerating the cat takes care of itself. :)
Tweet, tweet.
When I was in college, the kids who were the over-achievers in high school were always the first to crash and burn when they hit college. Without their parents to drive them, they went nuts (sometimes literally). Didn't happen to all of them, but it was a lot more common with them than with the rest of us. Probably about half of the Governor's Scholars and Presidential Scholars I knew failed out their freshmen year.
Check back 5 years later when they've matured just a little. Some of those kids will have recovered and gone back to college. They may not have persued the same degree but I bet you'll find a lot of them have adjusted after the massive culture shock that no longer being spoon fed constitutes. Others of course will not have had the tenacity for a comeback, but I think the numbers that did will surprise you.
That's just one reason it's important not to write someone off if they don't succeed immediately.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I know that in our politically-correct world, postulating even the very *idea* that there are cultural differences between groups of people automatically makes you a raving racist Nazi who wants to send everyone without blond hair and blue eyes to the gas chambers. So, now that we've dispensed with the mutual bullshit and established that I'm obviously a Klan member who would dare deny that we are all exactly the same in every way, I feel compelled to respond with some clarifying (and obviously racist) observations.
Believe it or not, asian parents DO tend to push there kids much harder than most other groups. Not all of them, certainly, but more than enough to make this obvious to all but the most deluded of observers. And, not coincidentally, this puts a lot of asian kids under a lot of stress to perform. And what happens when you put something under a lot of stress and suddenly release the valve? Well, sometimes it can cause problems. Not all the time, but more than the norm.
And, observant reader that you are, I'm glad you also ignored the "Didn't happen to all of them" statement in my original post to see the obvious truth that what I *really* meant to say was that "ALL asians are over-achievers" and "ALL over-achievers implode in college." I wouldn't want anyone confused by any nuance or qualification.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a Klan meeting to attend. This week we're spewing our hate by posting shocking allegations on the internet saying that the majority of illegal immigrants in the United States are hispanic. Can you believe our ignorance?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.