Slashdot Mirror
Altered Organism Triples Solar Cell Efficiency
An anonymous reader writes "By harnessing the shells of living organisms in the sea, microscopic algae called diatoms, engineers have tripled the efficiency of experimental dye-sensitized solar cells. The diatoms were fed a diet of titanium dioxide, the main ingredient for thin film solar cells, instead of their usual meal which is silica (silicon dioxide). As a result, their shells became photovoltaic when coated with dyes. The result is a thin-film dye-sensitized solar cell that is three times more efficient than those without the diatoms."
Neat. When can I buy them for my house?
So does this mean we now have to call them dye-atoms?
Don't bother throwing things...I've already taken cover.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
So, with the "breakthrough" a few months ago that three different dyes in a cell could capture 40% of light from the sun, does that make this more efficient than coal?
Could the ecomentalists finally have something to cheer about?!
xkcdsw: the unofficial archive of Making xkcd Slightly Worse
From toothpaste to DE Filters to solar cells.
I love nature - if mankind paid more attention to it we'd be so much more advanced than we are currently.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Nasty humans exploiting those defenseless unicellular creatures!
Diatoms that generate electricity... great! Who's in charge of soldering the leads to them so we can harness it ?
titanium dioxide is the main pigment base in modern (but not pre-70's) white paint. While titanium is not a particularly cheap metal, paint chips are something that is actually hard to get rid of. I wonder if they could be fed on waste drywall stripped from homes. that's basically paint, paper, and gypsum.
Of course diatoms are going to make better solar cells. I mean just look at the name, diatom is greek for two atoms. There's twice as many atoms there, so you'd guess they would make at least twice as good solar cells.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the magic number.
Triple efficiency of what? I was only able to find this paragraph that put some numbers.
Dye-sensitized solar cells are favored as a thin-film material because they work in low-light conditions and are fabricated with environmentally benign materials compared to silicon solar cells. However, silicon cells have more than twice the efficiency, as much as 20 percent compared to less than 10 percent for dye-sensitized solar cells.
So Are we talking about 3x 20%? One could only wish. I think they mean 3x 10%, so 30% efficency, which is only 50% better than silicon solar cell. I guess that's still a big improvement.
Do the diatoms die from shock?
Lousy headline here. They haven't tripled the efficiency of the already best solar cells out there, but just some over variant that wasn't so very efficient to start with.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Not for diatoms, maybe, but for nano-sea-kittens?
Not a sentence!
"even the PETA retards aren't that rabid"
Wanna bet? :-p
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I wonder what effect this will have on evolutionary processes in the diatoms.
How will they respond to the titanium dioxide in an evolutionary context?
Maybe they can do the same with humans, and we no longer need to eat: just hang out in the sun. My wife keeps telling me that I'm as lazy as a plant anyhow. Might as well go all the way.
Table-ized A.I.
I'm sorry, but three times something you'll never have is still zero.
Did anyone else notice that the article didn't bother to compare the solar cells with, I don't know, other solar cells? They didn't talk about efficiency compared to any other existing method of making solar cells, except for the exact same methodology minus the diatoms.
Sounds like they are "fishing" for some more funding. Oh yes I can.
Dr. Alexander Shulgin talks about something similar, making a mushroom take care of his work.
However there is a very interesting study that took place in Leipzig about 15 years ago. Jochen Gartz, a mushroom explorer whom I know quite well, has done some fascinating studies with Psilocybe species by raising them on solid media containing strange tryptamines that are alien to the mushroom. Apparently the enzymes that are responsible for the 4-hydroxy group of psilocin are indifferent to what it is they choose to 4-hydroxylate. He has taken things like DPT or DIPT and put them in the growth media and the fruiting bodies that came out contain 4-hydroxy-DPT or 4-hydroxy-DIPT instead of psilocin.
30 seconds of googling reports that dye cells currently produce around 6-10%. If you can triple that, it makes a really good solar cell. If you can do that and keep costs low, it makes a great solar cell.
... but diatoms are *Not* animals.
They are eukaryote, but not animals. Plus, PETA doesn't really care about microscopic animals --- they care about the animals you would learn about in a book for children.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromalveolata