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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.
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.
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.
1) Write down kid's name 2) Buy stock in whoever picks him up 3) Profit! Hang on, I've got too many filled out steps...
when a kid's parents have helped them with their science fair projects.
For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
He can take $20 out of that $25,000 and buy them from the ninth grader down the street.
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
"Furthermore...
OMG! Zerg Rush! KEKEKEKEKEKEKE"
apologies, i had to bring the discussion down to my iq level at his age
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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
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.
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.
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
Use of "fixed that for you" shall be considered proof that the user is a completely awesome badass.
fixed that for you.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
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.
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.
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.
Since commercially-available solar cells in fact absorb more than 90% of the light in the usable bands-- and about fifty percent over the whole solar spectrum, including the non-usable wavelenghts-- that's pretty darn amazing.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
"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
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
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.
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.
Your math is right, but it has nothing to do with the summary or article, which both say "500 times".
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.
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...
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.
Since commercially-available solar cells convert around 10% of the incident light to electricity, we can safely say that they are "absorbing" at least 10%.
So, if they absorb 500 times that amount we have a solar cell with 500*10% = 5000% conversion efficiency!
YOWZAH!!!
Now the skeptics out there will claim that this violates conservation of energy, but did they stop to consider that his may be a new form of low temperature solid state nuclear fusion merely catalyzed by solar radiation???
HMMMMM?????
Seastead this.
Screw your worm spices.
The kid needs Brawndo. It's got electrolytes!
How does it qualify as "well played" to make the same blindingly obvious "joke" that I didn't think of?
Fixed that for you.
1) Develop 3d nanotube solar cell
2) Win science contest
3) Complete manufacturing tests
4) Manufacture
5) Become billionaire...
6) Jill Smith will like me! x0x0x
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.
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.
"At first, he couldn't believe his calculations.
"This solar cell can't be generating this much electricity, it can't be absorbing this much extra light," he recalled thinking."
And then he realized he should have divided instead of multiplied.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Uh huh. Whether I thought of it or not is irrelevant. Fact of the matter is that this is far from the first time a person with a sense of humor has decided that my signature needs this particular treatment.
Fixed that for you.
> 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
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
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.
a bong from a McDonald's cup.
I was front page news on High Times, all the international attention was very stressful, I think. I'm not really sure. What was I talking about?
ed duval the very last person
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well he is 12, so that would be illegal. I feel compelled to stand in on his behalf. This one time I will "take one for the team".