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New Metamaterial Means More Efficient Solar Cells
ElectricSteve writes "Metamaterials are man-made substances designed to do some very weird things that natural materials don't. The path of a beam of light through a natural material like glass is predictable, but scientists from the California Institute of Technology have engineered an optical material that bends light in the wrong direction. This new negative-index metamaterial (NIM) could have several valuable uses including invisibility cloaking, superlensing (imaging nano-scale objects using visible light), and improved light collection in solar cells."
...and frikkin sharks who can fire round corners.
AT&ROFLMAO
If we'll finally get real X-Ray Specs now that would be a good use....
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
I'll believe it when I don't see it.
Please explain to me why the title of this news post is "New Metamaterial Means More Efficient Solar Cells" instead of "New Metamaterial Means Kickass Invisibility Cloak"?
Nothing to see here.
Somebody got the idea that you could use this stuff to steer light onto solar cells. Reasonable mistake.
You have to steer a solar cell to follow the sun so it's collecting the most light.
Steering the light once it's hit the panel is mostly useless-- you're too late -- you're just not intercepting the sun.
For example if the sun is 45 degrees to the side, you're only getting cos(45) or 70.7% of the rays. Nothing you do at the panel can change that.
And there are already special reflector shapes that have the amazing property of steering light from many angles to one destination. And they're just plain metal surfaces, no nanotech required.
Wondering about the time to market in the solar industry, because for the past 2 years I have been reading all about revolutionary new solar cell techniques, from baking your own solar cells in the oven for well under $1/Watt, to solar cells stacked in 3D that increase efficiency to 80%, to dies that help normal solar cells absorb light better, to flexible solar cells that could cover any surface, to special plastics that concentrate light onto solar cells. But you know what? Not a single solar cell on the market today includes these concepts.
IMO the "cheap, efficient solar cell" will arrive just after the flying car. And the market is certainly resisting current $4-$5/watt retail prices.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There are an infinite number of ways to generate clean energy. The number of ways which can do so economically, however, is something like (infinity - very few).
There are an infinite number of ways to cure cancer. The number of ways which can do so without killing the patient, however, is something like (infinity - very few).
There are an infinite number of ways to store data. The number of ways which can do so usefully, however, is something like (infinity - very few).
Slashdot needs an "impractical tech idea" category for corralling all the all the grad students working on generating papers about their useless-but-interesting areas of research.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"You've created a new element."
"Thanks, JARVIS. Now, where the hell is it?"
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
As usual with "SOLAR CELLS HERE TOMORROW!" stories, the actual important news in the story is buried around paragraph six.
This is not the first time such a material has been developed, but it is the first one that can handle light of any polarity, from any angle. It also works in the blue part of the visible spectrum, making it the first NIM to operate at visible frequencies.
Ah, thank you. As usual, a nice, modestly useful development of moderate interest to those who study materials engineering, and of essentially zero interest to anybody else. (Well, except for us science nerds, who shouldn't have to be sold the fluff, but it's what we get anyway.)
But since press releases attract more attention than journal articles, at least when they promise free power, you put FREE SOLAR ENERGY at the top and actual scientific research gets a paragraph somewhere in the middle.
1987? Pff. Cloaking technology was used in 1986 when the crew of the starship Enterprise arrived from the future aboard the HMS Bounty to acquire humpback whales to appease a mysterious space dildo.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
I am sick and tired of these "could have tremendous impact bla bla bla" statements. Typically nothing comes out of them in the short term and only tiny improvements to existing solutions in the longer term. Marketing speech sucks and it is time we call it "commercial lies" or maybe with Neil Stephenson "commercial bullshit".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Is it theoretically possible to slow down light enough so that it takes a day, month or even a year or two to arrive at the other end of a material? This way you can have a time machine from the past, or use free lighting from the daytime, but at night.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Good lord. That thing was a space dildo? I'd hate to see the giant, planet devouring vagina it went in. Wait, we did see it, didn't we? Kirk flew a starship right up it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
n = c/v. For air, n = 1.000277, so light is slightly slowed down by air. All natural materials slow down light. For diamond, n = 2.417. This helps make diamonds interesting and sparkly. If n 0, then v 0. what does this mean? Is the light traveling backward? or back in time? I am seriously confused. Actually, this does mean that the material has backwards phase propagation. This particular material has n = -2. Ordinarily the group velocity is similar to the phase velocity. But they did not give us enough info in the public article to figure out exactly what's up
wake up and hold your nose
I don't think that a vag exists in space or time that James T. Kirk has not been all-up-ins. I'll bet that's what he was really doing in the Nexus before Picard got there.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
...to throw the switch (no pun intended) on solar power for my house but every three months I hear of some new material that's supposed to make them cheaper and more efficient.
Sigh.
is as efficient as the free "limitless" nuclear power concepts of the 1950's.
For decades, we have seen stories about how some new technology will revolutionize the computing. Be it optical, quantum, nano, bio, or whatever, some scientist always seems to think that if he can somehow implement a NAND gate, no matter how contrived, then it will lead to a new era in computing technology.
Solar cells are the new gates.
All of the announcements of new tech all just seem to be like patent adverts. I think these people are just trying to shop around patents so they can get cash for em.
Announcing a new tech that could possibly be used somewhere sucks. Announcing a new product using so and so tech would be more useful.
Here is a link to the actual journal article.
I would like to point out that the guy promoting the use of negative index materials (NIMs) in solar cells is being extremely optimistic. The Kramers-Kronig dispersion relations require any and all passive NIMs to be inherently lossy at the wavelength of interest. In addition, the wider your try to make the bandwidth, the more loss will incur.
Don't get me wrong, metamaterials are an extremely interesting field of research, but to promote their use for energy harvesting is ridiculous. They are much more interesting for beating the diffraction limit.
... Look into Bob Shaw "Other Days, Other Eyes" (sci-fi, 1972) - wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Shaw
There was a sequel by Stephen Baxter/Arthur C. Clarke "The Light of Other Days" (which was the original title of the short .. I found the Baxter/Clarke book to be more forgettable apparently.
story "Other Days, Other Eyes" was based on)
IMO the "cheap, efficient solar cell" will arrive just after the flying car. And the market is certainly resisting current $4-$5/watt retail prices.
What market are you in? Prices have been falling for a while. (Even your quoted numbers are significantly below the $10+ of a few years back, too.)
If you're willing to accept slight cosmetic defects you can currently get UL-approved panels in quantity for just under $2 or fine working panels without UL approval markings for about $1 (for projects where you don't need fire insurance or code approval).
That's bringing home-sized systems close to unsubsidized price breakeven with grid power for sunny suburban sites. Unlike the flying car, it's just the price-performance of panels, batteries, and inverter/control electronics that has been limiting mass solar power deployment. At prices up to those of recent times it is only a win where the cost of running grid power is high. That means new construction at remote sites without existing grid power, or small stuff like emergency phones, road signs, and lawn lights.
The constant announcement of research breakthroughs (on both panels and batteries) shows how much R&D money is being spent on improving the technology. This is good. Most of these things won't end up making it to market. They'll be too expensive or too fragile for commercialization, or replaced by something better. But, as with computers, semiconductors, and Moore's Law, the industry has reached the takeoff point. Some of the flood of innovations will combine to form a reasonably steady improvement ramp.
Computers went from buildings full of boxes and cabling managed by lab-coated initiates, through half-rack boxes built into lab equipment, through progressively smaller personal workstations, through automobile engine control, to replacing a handfull of switches and motors in everything from ovens and clothes washers to light timers. And this happened over the lifetime of the baby boom generation, not in a sudden event.
There was a stage where personal computers were only the hands of a few hobbyists, followed soon by a stage where it gradually became a common home office device or rich kid's toy before becoming ubiquitous. That's about where solar power is now.
And that's about the transition I expect it to take, in a similar time scale, if it's not eclipsed by something even better (like if polywell, focus, or some other fusion system works out and grid power prices drop drastically as a result).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It must be at least once a month now that we hear about some advance in solar technology. And yet there are zero of these new cheap and highly efficient options actually in production at the moment.
Progress in a lab is one thing. We need it in the marketplace for it to really have any impact.
Who cares about what possible (unlikely) improvement this would be solar cells. How about camera optics?
In particular, this NIM would be useful for correcting chromatic aberration, which I currently have to correct for planetary imaging in software (which is a bit of a hit-and-miss affair, unfortunately).
The "cheap, efficient solar cell" arrived about the time pocket calculators came with them.
We're now looking at extra icing on the cake that allows a wider range of uses.