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Not Transparent Aluminum, But Conductive Plastic
michaelmalak writes "Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory have fabricated transparent, thin films capable of absorbing light and generating electric charge over a relatively large area. The material, described in the journal Chemistry of Materials (subscription required), could be used to develop transparent solar panels or even windows that absorb solar energy to generate electricity. The material consists of a semiconducting polymer doped with carbon-rich fullerenes."
Sounds like this would be great for skyscapers, where you have huge windows all the way up and direct sunlight for long periods of the day.
to a manufacturer in China..
I assume they'd act like tinted windows since they'd be absorbing some of the light.
car windows which gradually charge the battery perhaps?
Now when we run out of indium-tin oxide(or the chinese just stop selling it to us), we can still make LCDs, OLEDs, and EL wire.
If it is transparent but also absorbs light, which parts of the spectrum does it absorb? PV panels typically only convert a limited part of the spectrum, so if these transparent panels absorbed only green light you would not get white light coming out but purple.
This wouldn't be an absolute show stopper, but coloured windows are not all that appealing.
"windows that absorb solar energy to generate electricity" so... that would be unlike "transparent solar panels" how?
*shakes head*
The more transparent it is, the less energy it can absorb. What level of efficiency can it achieve?
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Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
This is the kind of implementation that actually makes sense. You don't need dedicated hardware or real estate to set it up. Granted northern exposure probably would work but put this stuff all over southern exposure windows in a whole city and tie it all onto the grid. It's akin to not using food crops for biofuels. Algae and switch grass make more sense.
Now the big key is getting the cost per kilowatt down where it's competitive with traditional power generation. And of course you really need a large scale storage system. I remember a Popular Science article about giant underground flywheels.
The "relatively large area" is just a few millimeters. The transparency of the material is because it has almost no light gathering area. Like putting up chicken-wire to keep the wind out. OP is hyperbole
Kudos for adding a link to the original research article. Not a lot of blogs, news sites, etc. do this. BTW the supporting information to the article is available free of charge (nitty - gritty experimental details). (This is common among paywalled articles)
Windows that effeciently absorb light are NOT windows. They would be called WALLS.
Personal energy consumption is a benefit of wealth. Lowering the cost of energy generation should increase the ability for larger proportions of mankind to increase their own personal energy consumption and move one step closer to a rightfully just existence.
Sorry if I'm just being dense, but what, exactly, is the difference between "could be used to develop transparent solar panels or even windows that absorb solar energy to generate electricity."
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I just wanted to point out that there is no magic involved here. Necessarily, as the conductivity of a material increases, it becomes more opaque. This is because conductivity is directly related to how well the material screens (i.e. blocks) electric fields (like light). Usually, a material is at one extreme though -- either it is pretty conductive or pretty transparent, and so it's hard to find a material that's OK at both. The real advantage here is probably that the material is flexible, unlike traditional transparent/conductive materials like Indium-tin-oxide (ITO)
Again, we have some minor bit of progress in materials science being touted as a big breakthrough. They haven't fabricated anything but a hexagonal membrane, which has been done before. They're not even able to make a small prototype device. From that, it's a huge jump to "Imagine a house with windows made of this kind of material, which, combined with a solar roof, would cut its electricity costs significantly. This is pretty exciting.". There are lots of other solar cell technologies which are much further along and still don't yield useful products. Nanosolar, a hype-based solar panel company, comes to mind. The enthusiasm for thin-film solar has decreased since ordinary solar cells became cheaper, and thin-film cells got stuck at half the efficiency of regular ones. This is turning into a manufacturing problem, not a technology one. "We grow every year with double revenue and almost double capacity. At end of the year, we will have 1.8 gigawatts of capacity and will have grown from 4,000 employees at the beginning of this year to more than 11,000." - Fang Pen, JA Solar, Shanghai.
Conductive plastic isn't a big deal. Conductive plastics are commercially available. The foam in which ICs are packed is conductive.
This is Los Alamos and Brookhaven, the old atomic labs, struggling to avoid more downsizing.
Some links that have more information, without having to give money to the Chemistry of Materials:
http://news.discovery.com/tech/material-could-collect-sunlight-from-roof-and-windows.html
http://www.lanl.gov/news/releases/scientists_produce_transparent_light-harvesting_material.html
Oh, and one more thing:
Buckminster Fuller strikes again! AHAHAHAHAHAhahahahahaha... hah.
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I want my Dymaxion
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What's really going on in solar is that big US companies with real manufacturing expertise are moving in.
This is where the action is. Solar is a heavy-manufacturing business, and it's the companies with experience in running big factories that are now taking over.
Have existed for years already. Low power and expensive, but they have existed. Paint on PV exists as well, a company in the UK was going to incorporate it into sheet metal for buildings, the siding and the roof.
Except a lot of this stuff disappears after it is announced, you never hear of it again. Once or twice, a coincidence, now that it has been twenty years and change I have been following solar breakthroughs, and noticed that hardly any of these breakthroughs, dozens and dozens, actually make it to retail, I am calling large scale conspiracy and market manipulation.
So we can use these in windows to both block out the sunlight and power indoor lighting? Talk about killing two birds with one stone!
My webcomic
How can a transparent thing absorb a large fraction of the energy? This sounds like an oxymoron.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Either there's a glitch in the matrix or I feel like something similar had been created about 8 or 9 years ago. I remember reading about it either here or on engadget around 2004. After some googling back in time I managed to find this: http://www.rense.com/general20/transparentalum.htm which is the closest thing that comes to mind. I wish I had better source. Can anyone please explain how the two differ?
Here are some improved article headlines:
Not Transparent Steel, But Conductive Plastic
Not Non-Conductive Plastic, But Conductive Plastic
Not Green Eggs And Ham, But Conductive Plastic
What?? We're doping plastic now? Just imagine what other innocent materials could also be sullied with 'performance-enhancing' substances!
In 1987 I saw a functioning hybrid car which was sent out to run at a mine - electric underground, fuel above ground and regenerating power from the brakes. Consider how long it was between that finished specialty product and a mass market hybrid vehicle like the Prius (ten years).
It's the same deal with these other things. You might not be hearing about them but that doesn't mean that they are not in use in some niche somewhere.
Pope Innocent IV would like a word with you all...
My watch is made with Transparent Aluminum.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Maybe it eats the light in part of the spectrum we can't see.
Not according to the article. It absorbes visible light but only at the edges of a small honeycomb structure. This leads me to think that if will only be useful as a replacement for tinted windows and not fully transparent ones.
This is just BS, transparency means photons are not absobed. If they are not absorbed there is no energy, so the yield will be very low.
sheeesshhh....
Not Aluminum, idiots.
Why are our tax dollars funding things like this when we're losing a war and faith based initiatives are underfunded? We need to shrink our government and trust that if there were any hope for this to work, private industry would be investing in it so they could maximize their long term profits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_oxynitride
-Eric
In fairness, there is also the problem that improperly done PV is DANGEROUS. There have been numerous cases of fires in houses equipped with PVs where it turned out to be an electrical fire starting with frayed wires off the PVs (squirrels etc.). Even *IF* the PV isn't the origin, it still can be a problem in a fire. During a fire, it is beneficial to be able to shut off the power, fire departments are VARY picky about this. At the data-center I work at we had to jump through all types of hoops to make sure power from our (old-fashion diesel) generators could be disconnected by emergency personnel. That isn't the power company (they know it isn't cost-effective for us to run on diesel and with the amount of power we use, they love us), that's the firefighters.
The other thing we had to do was prove it wasn't going to back-feed onto the lines. That is the power company, but not because of some conspiracy to keep you from competing. The reason we have to do that is so that when they send workers up to work on the lines, after they disconnect power, they want to be sure power is actually disconnected. Our facility is on a decommissioned air force base, and in a number of places power was designed to back-feed (military wanted it redundant), It has cost more then on electrician their life.