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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.""
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.
> 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
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.
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
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
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.
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?
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
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
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?
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. :)
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