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Jackie Chan Discs Help Boost Solar Panel Efficiency
wbr1 writes Apparently the pit pattern on a blu-ray disk is great at helping trap photons, rather than reflecting them. Applying this pattern to the glass in a solar panel can boost efficiency by 22%. Researchers at Northwestern tested this system with Jackie Chan discs. From the article: "To increase the efficiency of a solar panel by 22%, the researchers at Northwestern bought a copy of Police Story 3: Supercop on Blu-ray; removed the top plastic layer, exposing the recording medium beneath; cast a mold of the quasi-random pattern; and then used the mold to create a photovoltaic cell with the same pattern....The end result is a solar panel that has a quantum efficiency of around 40% — up about 22% from the non-patterned solar panel."
Cue copyright infringement suit in 3..2..1...
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Imagine what it could be with a Chuck Norris movie!!!
If this can be mass produced quickly by the likes of Solar City, imagine the gains! This could mean independence from fossil fuels in the next 2 years. Very exciting stuff.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
What happens when dirt gets trapped in the crevices? With flat panels the dirt will surely wash off with rain, with these ones will that be the case?
Why wast a reasonably good Blu-ray movie when I'm sure there are plenty of bad ones looking for a use?
I don't know if supercop was a good movie or not but it had to have been better than a number of movies.
Time to offend someone
They should have used a really bad movie instead. This is such a waste.
It's not the random pits it the disc boosting efficiency, it's Jackie Chan's awesomeness. If you use a JCVD disc it won't work at all, it will just suck the light in and not produce any energy.
The pits on a blu ray disc are optimized for reading with a blue laser. Sun's output have more energy at the other end (red spectrum). I'm thinking they might get even better efficiency if they tried a disc pitting pattern that was meant for reading with a red laser.
Quasi random my eye. That's copyright infringement! Unleash the hounds!
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
How are there no references to the Jackie Chan cartoon show here? C'mon people...
... Uwe Boll DVDs are experiencing an uptick in sales.
Have gnu, will travel.
I heard the first attempt was with Chuck Norris discs, but they burnt holes through the panels.
Be relentless!
Movie not important! Yu mo gui gwai fai di zao, yu mo gui gwai fai di zao...
Maybe this means there will finally be a use for that Green Lantern movie dvd.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
whether "boosted by 22%" means quantum efficiency went from 18% to 40%, or from 33% to 40% ?
That's one helluva case of 'sticky hands'. Photons beware!
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
Electricity and oil are both energy. You can substitute one for the other, though obviously there's advantages for certain forms in certain uses.
For home heating, oil, natural gas, and electricity are all viable depending on the cost. Right now gas is the cheapest and electricity is, in most places, the most expensive. It would take a lot of progress to get electricity to be the most economic solution for heating.
For aircraft, the weight of batteries rules them out.
For cars, Tesla is proving that electricity is an option. I know that we just signed a contract for solar panels on our house to produce more than we currently use on the assumption that we'll need the extra production to power our next car.
They can probably make it even more efficient by adding random props in the mix. Maybe try to capture solar energy while fighting around a ladder, or using some chickens as nunchucks. This is Jackie Chan after all....
There is no way a Jet Li disc could accomplish this.
Use Commando, remastered on BluRay!
"Get the sunlight to the Choppah!!!!"
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
What the HELL does the name of the movie on the disc, much less the star of said movie, actually contribute to this process / article? Confused clicks, thats what. I nominate this headline for this years "Most Worthless Headline" award.
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
Is it legal to make molds from Bluray disks?
If they used a Chuck Norris movie instead!
I bet that any Chuck Norris Blu-ray would increase it 200%
I wonder if they did any real world testing, as in a static solar panel and a complete day average. Somehow I would imagine these would make the solar panels great, during a narrow window of the day where the sun is directly overhead. I can't shake the feeling however that this kind of patterning would have a detrimental effect on indirect exposure. Not that it is a major issue, sun tracking systems are becoming more prevalent, but it may be an issue.
Please correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't this an increase in the surface area of the solar cell..? Sure, some kind of pitting is going to be more effective at capturing rays (as one reader pointed out, sizing it for the red light of the sun) than a totally flat surface, assuming surface space is a factor in solar collection.. I imagine those minuscule pits would actually greatly increase the surface area of a disc.
But can the panels do their own stunts???
finally a use for twilight!
If they can do this with SuperCop, just imagine what sort of efficencies they could get by using an AC/DC album! Also by using AC/DC as the base pattern it might allow them to create native AC and skip the use of a DC->AC power inverter.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/...
Nice try, though
Costs are often through the roof with these technologies; mounting complexities and steep installation costs result in flash peak expenses that only gutter out after years of trussing up the math in spreadsheets. Tiling the cells can shake out some additional margin, but just the thought of it gives me shingles.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
The latter - but that's still a nice jump in the solar cell world.
No, that's a terrible quantum efficiency in the solar cell world.
Quantum efficiency is electrons out per photon in. In the wavelength band over which a solar cell absorbs, the quantum efficiency of a good solar cell ought to be very close to 100%. Even a mediocre solar cell should be 90% or better.
40%??? That's nothing to brag about.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Sorry, didn't quite mean to submit there.
TKD is a very specialized sport art. Very limited engagement rules and a complete lack of tools for dealing with anything but an upright, sparring style opponent relegate it to at best a functional niche limited to kicking (which any well rounded martial artist can convert into a different engagement, ground for instance) in the course of which instantly defanging most of the TKD stylists tools. TL;DR, TKD is more of a sport than a martial art. I should know; I'm dan-ranked in it within the context of the Korean taekwondo jidokwan, one of the earlier kwans that preceded the establishment of the WTF and ITF collaboration / standardizations.
Chan's martial arts background spans several styles (Shaolin gongfu, taekwondo, and hapkido), and consequently is broadly based with ground, standup, upright grappling, locking, striking, blocking, kicking, footwork and defensive components. He is by *any* sane measure a much more well rounded martial artist than Norris (and if you just admire kicking skill, I'm surprised you didn't bring up Bill "superfoot" Wallace.)
Li started training at age 8. He won his first national championship at age 11 -- remember we're talking about China here -- he traveled to more than 45 countries as a member of the Beijing wushu team. He held the title of All-Around National Wushu Champion from 1974 to 1979. He trained in internal and external styles, as well as the (then) required shíba ban bingqi (eighteen arms or weapons.)
(Please excuse the mangled pinyin; I don't use pinyin much, preferring actual hanzi, and traditional hanzi at that. (hanja for you TKD folks.) But slashdot doesn't support them (why? some geek site, lol)
Wushu means "martial art." It doesn't tell you squat about martial art effectiveness, other than that the practitioner, like a "martial artist" in the US, practices some martial art or arts. You should have a look right here so next time you use the term wushu in the context of a Chinese martial artist, you actually know what you're saying. Although, technically speaking, just like gongfu (doesn't really mean martial art at all), the term carries implications you might not initially grasp; for instance, to a Chinese, a Korean TKD master is both a gongfu and a wushu master, plain and simple. Which again demonstrates that wushu doesn't mean anything even close to what you thought it meant.
However, your previous statement is worse in that it amounts to a blanket dismissal of all of China's martial arts, which is nothing short of ludicrous. Combined with your bewilderment of both Chan and Li's training backgrounds, your credibility is somewhere south of zero on this matter.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Can I still play the disk at night? I love Jackie Chan and being able to get free Jackie Chan movies with my solar panel order would be a huge plus.
you save all of your AOL cd's...
--- We need more Ron Paul!
> solar panel that has a quantum efficiency of around 40%
Conventional panels have a QE around 90%. That's why they're opaque.
If only they had used a Dragon Ball Z Blu-ray disc instead, the efficiency would have increased by over 9000%!!!.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If the crevices get dirty the disk just won't play, or it will give constant errors. Wipe it with damp cloth. And don't give it to your kids again.
blueray is compressed, therefore the bit pattern has practically nothing to do with the actual content, is simply random distribution.
Best AC/DC cover ever.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Wouldn't the best efficiency come from a Blu-ray with random noise?
...what the blue-ray was really designed for... to solve energy problems...
Just imagine the efficiency gains had they used Chuck Norris discs!
But alas the world may not be ready
You can use oil to make plastics.
Electricity, not so much...
So in all of this time researching solar panels, are you telling me nobody checked into the glass or the pattern of glass on top of the panels themselves? And they also did not look into the various wavelengths of light that penetrate through the glass to know what works better and what works worse?
Pardon me, but is this a joke? This seems like such an obvious area of research related to the industry of gathering solar power that I almost can't believe it wasn't studied before now. What am I missing here?
Can someone who understands PV cells properly answer me this - it's my understanding that most standard PV cells get say low 20-something percent efficiencies and that the highest at the mo is around 40% acheived with significant solar amounts of concentration. Is this a genuine like-for-like beating of the best of the current crop or some fudging of the maths?
So, then, where can I purchase one of your 90% or better efficiency solar cells?
Quantum efficiency is not the same as energy conversion efficiency. A solar cell with 90% quantum efficiency isn't too hard to find. It's not going to have 90% energy conversion efficiency.
https://www.google.com/search?...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Modern silicon cells are ALL textured & include anti-reflection coatings, which increases qe to near 100%. They are merely showing the increase over unpatterned Uncoated cells. If they were to compare their method to traditional silicon cells results would be comparable or worse.
Let's see Chuck Norris do that!
Adding another layer of material will decrease transmission of light in the opposite way that surface patterns work to increase the transmission of light: Any medium with a refractive index different to air will reflect some percentage of incident rays that are not perpendicular to the surface, surface patterns can help avoid this by effectively changing the angle of incidence to be closer to the surface normal or redirecting some of the reflected rays.
It would be better if the surface doubled as the protective layer. Provided the pattern is small enough or better yet if a pattern was chosen which is also poor at allowing particular sized molecules (i.e water) to settle on it's surface in the same way that hydrophobic surfaces work... then it should be perfectly suitable as a protective layer also.