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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.""
How do people that young get access to tools to build these things?
So does anyone know what 3d shape he used to achieve a 500x efficiency gain? I would RTFA but it appears to have been slashdotted.
I thought multi-layered solar cells which captured increasingly high energy photos were common. I thought there were clearly understood theoretical limits on conversion efficiency, and that it would not be remotely possible to get 500 times more light absorption than currently achieved. I'm extremely skeptical.
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.
That is why kids are questioned without their parents present at science fairs.
It is not perfect, but it is sometimes hard to prove the difference between a parent who teaches their kid lots of science which puts there kid years ahead of their classmates, and a project that was simply done for them.
You wouldn't want to penalize someone who simply had scientific parents who are active in their kids education, would you?
In education (USA), kids with involved parents do better across the board because it is reinforced at home. This is sought after and encouraged in elementary/middle school education.
500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells
Uhm, no. FAIL.
Still, if he's getting money, there's likely something good going on here, but the reporting on this is completely ridiculous. It's enough to make me curious as to the REAL figures.
"Regular solar cells are only 2D and only allow light interaction once," he said.
If this means what I think it means, it would seem to indicate that he has worked out some type of translucent PV cell that allows him to either stack cells or to mirror the light to cause it to travel through multiple cells.
If you could create a translucent PV cell that still performed on par with today's leading PV cells, and you put it on top of a mirror, and then you put a semi-translucent mirror on top of the PV cell, you might be able to increase the efficiency of a single cell with out increasing the silicone. You'd still be losing some energy to heat, but from the lay-mans arm chair, it would seem to be worth a shot. And completely concievable as something a 12 year old who is good with math and science could figure out on paper (determine amount of energy input and the amount of energy transferred/lost to heat for each pass through the PV cell, and the reflection/refraction rates for the mirrors.
Anyway, that's my first thought after reading what scant details were mentioned.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
How does it qualify as "well played" to make the same blindingly obvious "joke" that at least 30 other people have already made?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
In education (USA), kids with involved parents do better across the board because it is reinforced at home. This is sought after and encouraged in elementary/middle school education.
You betcha. We're in the process of adopting a 5th grader and you can just tell he hasn't had the attention paid to his work or work habits that we put into our older son. He was shocked we wanted to go over the test questions he missed. He got really frustrated with it. It was plainly obvious he'd never had anyone even look at his work before.
He's come a long way, though, and we're very proud of him.
-l
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From that comment I gather that this 'design' is in a very questionable state. If a real prototype has not been proven to work then this design is worth roughly the negative value of the piece of paper its written on. The physics of silicon is very involved at the nano-structure level and getting it right on the first go is very difficult considering having a single ion in the wrong strata could short out the entire cell and it would produce nothing. For a 3D cell to work it would have to use the physical properties of light such that different wavelengths of light penetrate to different depths before absorption, and each depth needs to have the ability to trap and carry that charge out to a collection grid on the surface without interfering with the other layers collection grids. Each grid would then set up a charged field that would potentially affect the silicon around it thereby defeating much of the gains of increased 3D collection area. For a 12 year old to get that right on paper the first time would be nothing short of astonishing. My advice? Build a prototype first then talk to reporters later, and then this will be surly slashdot worthy. I'll give the kid a lot of credit here, but lets not jump the gun until we know some variation of this actually works.
--
I'm a glass half full kind of guy.
Ah, but you see, exactly the same pattern will be followed here. This is Yet Another Revolutionary Solar Cell Development That Will Never See The Light Of Day. (Is there a handy acronym for that? Because we need one, it's so common here on slashdot.) (Er. No pun intended.)
First, the prototype will demonstrate the flaws in his computer model, and show that it's only a 5X increase, not a 500X increase (still dramatic). Then the whole idea will softly and silently vanish away, never to be commercialized anywhere, at any price. And we continue, business as usual. The government will do nothing to actively prevent it. It will just, somehow, never be produced in any sort of commercial quantities, and we'll never know why.
I give you +1 for cynicism, but you have much to learn, grasshopper.
Very strong parental expectations.
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.
Learn the value of who you already are, and be proud of it.
You remind me of the book "Brave New World" where they learned to genetically engineer geniuses on a mass scale but went back to creating middle and lower classes because the geniuses wouldn't to manual labor jobs.
In other words, the world needs ditch diggers.
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed H
The asian kids were the worst too. My asian high school co-valedictorian had to (I kid you not) be institutionalized after his first semester. His first week of college, his roommate physically kicked him out of his room because his intensity was too much to handle (he was the kind of guy who would snap your head off if you even spoke to him while he was studying). Then, shortly thereafter, he swung wildly in the other direction and became a full-blown alcoholic (not going to class at all).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It sounds like what got you the problem that almost nobody wants to learn in school any more, eh? Learn the value of being a prom queen who'll either marry a millionaire (stiff competition there, though) or be a waitress for the rest of your days, and be proud of that. Or learn to be value of being the jock who _might_ one day get lucky and get into a minor league sports team, but most likely will operate a gas pump or maybe unload crates at Wall-Mart.
Let's face it, in life you'll almost invariably hit lower than you aim. If you already aim low, you'll hit even lower. Starting from being nothing(*) and being proud and content with what you _already_ are (my emphasis) is a recipe for failure.
(*) and being mommy and daddy's "special" darling doesn't count there. If that's all you are and aim no higher, you'll eventually grow out of that and with _nothing_.
As for the middlers, I'll call bullshit on that feel-good fairy-tale. Historically the "middlers" were the guys ploughing the field and being plundered by both armies in a war. From the Roman Kingdom (yes, they were that before being a Republic, which they were before becoming an Empire) to some time during the 19'th century, that's what some 80% of the population was doing: the mind-numbingly boring task of walking behind a plough behind an ox or horse, holding onto the handles. Dawn to dusk. That's how the acre was even defined: how much a peasant can plough from dawn to dusk.
Add some miners, craftsmen, mercenaries and the like, and that accounts for even more people.
To even have the chance to be the guy who tinkers with a genius's ideas until they work, you had to be one of the most privileged 5% or less. The middlers were at best those guys kneading hides in dog shit (yes, that's how tanning worked) for the leather straps your invention needed. Or while those top few percent were busy inventing a better gun, the middlers were fermenting shit with piss to make saltpetre for that gun. Or while those top few were figuring out how to make a gothic cathedral (no mean feat, given the lack of even a mathematical notation you'd use these days), the middlers were hauling square slabs of rock for it. Stable contribution to technological progress of that middler gang: zero point zero.
Valuable contributions, nevertheless, but spare me the bullshit self-fellatio that such middlers were what caused stable technological progress.
Now I'm not saying you should go depressed about your skills or anything. But do aim higher, or you'll never improve. And spare us and yourself the bullshit story in which it's perfectly ok to be an underachiever and proud of it, and how such underachieving middlers had jack shit to do with technological progress.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Yeah because it's not like photovoltaics are the single technology with the most vapor and broken promises next to cold fusion and perpetual motion machines.
That said, it would take very little away from this kid's abilities even if his technique couldn't be commercialized directly. To even be able to run and understand the models that predict this is way beyond what most people can do, much less 12 year olds. With a little luck it will advance the state of the art, and with a lot, it will be a breakthrough. Just don't hold your breath on the latter.
Which is stupid, becasue even a genius will dig a ditch to survive. If you have an abundance of Geniuses, then they will do what the need to and make a buck. They may design a better way to do it, but it will get done none the less.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the problem with using nanotubes for anything is that it is very difficult to control their creation, growth and alignment. Also, he probably used a specific nanotube for this and to mass produce it they would need a way to create nanotubes that are identical - same size, diameter, length, chirality, etc. If he could figure out this last part, it would be incredible, but the process of selecting nanotubes for this and then aligning them properly is extremely difficult and expensive since atomic force microscopy is needed to identify the properties of the nanotubes.
That's total crap. If the world were made up entirely of geniuses, they would invent robots to do all the ditch digging for them.
100 years ago, something like 30% of the population were farmers. Now, it's more like 3%. Technology has increased productivity and allowed people to spend their time in other endeavors, like inventing the automated production line so that workers could move from assembly line to being engineers.
It's not until the engineers/scientists invent a computer so smart it can do our thinking for us that we have to worry. :)