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UCLA Develops Transparent, Electricity-Generating, Solar Cell Windows
Elliot Chang writes "A team from UCLA has developed a new transparent solar cell that has the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. In short, they've created a solar power-generating window! Described as 'a new kind of polymer solar cell (PSC)' that produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light instead of traditional visible light, the photoactive plastic cell is nearly 70% transparent to the human eye — so you can look through it like a traditional window."
Transparency is merely how much of the light gets through. What you are talking about is translucency (i.e. scattering). There's no indication from the article that there is significant scattering. It would just look like you had tinting on the window.
Want to sound like a fourth grader shilling their science project? Use exclamation marks in your summary.
There is a photo in the article. It's more like tinting your windows.
Disclosure: I am not an investor or employee.
The company XSUNX has been doing this for a few years with Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (as a competitor to Silicon and which theoretically is supposed to be better for the environment), generating thin film solar power that you can see through. Their first generation was a smoky amber glass with slight distortion; their current generation film is more like a tinted window.
I could use some for my Prius...
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Transparency is merely how much of the light gets through. What you are talking about is translucency (i.e. scattering). There's no indication from the article that there is significant scattering. It would just look like you had tinting on the window.
And not very much tinting, either. 70% transparent would just look like glass, if you didn't have something to compare it to. Even 90% tinting (10% transparent), as long as it is reasonably uniform at different color transmissions, doesn't interfere with vision at all ... sunglasses block more light than that!
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
produces energy by absorbing mainly infrared light instead of traditional visible light
Unclear how much energy you get in exchange for adsorbing 30% of the visible light and probably all the IR. However, if its a lot of light, it might be worthwhile to dip old fashioned incandescent bulbs into this goo. Rather optimistically, if it can generate more than 40% of the nameplate wattage by adsorbing all the IR and 30% of the visible, then you'd get ahead by recycling that power back into the grid. Not a perpetual motion machine, because 70% of the visible is still leaking out the lampshade, but it would be like the world's weirdest phosphor basically eating IR photons and emitting visible photons.
This does bring up the interesting point for unshaded windows, if it eats 30% of visible light, that merely means you need 30% more ultra-low-R value window area, or 30% more lightbulbs inside to brighten the room back up. So its not going to work well for windows in rooms where the drapes are always open and people are always inside. Great idea for my garage or bedroom (why do those have windows, anyway?) terrible idea for my office / kitchen / living room. Solar panel covered shutters seem like a good idea for the garage and bedroom... if the panels are rockin don't come a knockin or whatever.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Do you know what's even more plentiful and cheaper than fossil fuels? Poor people. We should be burning them instead.
So if I replaced a section of optical fiber with this stuff, it would look on the OTDR like the worlds most uninteresting little bump (oh look, sloppy winding in the splice case results in a minor bump, eh who cares) and I could detect the electrical field... Sounds like a optical tap design.
Of course a beam splitter would probably be a lot simpler, but supposedly there does not exist a beamsplitter design that doesn't inherently create what amounts to multipath that "looks like a beamsplitter" on a OTDR so simply doing something weird when you're tapping might help avoid detection.
The only undetectable optical tap I can think of is chilled-PMT based... I think that would be fairly undetectable if done right.
I haven't directly hands on done fiber since early 90s so I'm not sure. Probably fiber work is much like IT and CS, there is nothing new, just recycled old ideas along a baseline of slowly increasing speeds.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
"Our new PSCs are made from plastic-like materials and are lightweight and flexible," he said. "More importantly, they can be produced in high volume at low cost."
Of course, I'll believe that when I see the bill. However, if it works as they say about the only downside is that you won't get as much heat during cold winters through the windows. That's actually about it. Oh yeah, and they are polymers so they may require oil to be produced (maybe, not sure and don't care enough to find out). Maybe some Slashdoter could get worked up about that or something.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Given that untinted window glass is in the 80-90% range, 70% isn't bad at all.
Remember that you don't perceive brightness linearly. Its several orders of magnitude brighter outside on a sunny day than it is in a very well-lit room inside, but it doesn't feel that way. Think of how many light bulbs you'd need to have to match 1000W/m^2, factoring in also that even fluorescent and LED bulbs lose the lion's share of their energy as heat.
"99 dead duelists of Dios on the wall. 99 dead duelists of Dios! Take one's ring, pass it around..."
As apposed to the great results we're getting from the 0% efficiency models? For most cases these aren't replacements for traditional solar panels, but rather a supplement.
These could be particularly useful on large skyscrapers