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World's Oldest Nobel Prize Winner Is Working On Light 'Concentrators' That May Give Everyone Clean, Cheap Energy (businessinsider.com)
Iwastheone shares a report from Business Insider: Arthur Ashkin, the world's oldest Nobel Prize winner, [...] has turned the bottom floor of his house into a kind of laboratory where he's developing a solar-energy-harnessing device. Ashkin's new invention uses geometry to capture and funnel light. Essentially, it relies on reflective concentrator tubes that intensify solar reflections, which could make existing solar panels more efficient or perhaps even replace them altogether with something cheaper and simpler. The tubes are "dirt cheap," Ashkin says -- they cost just pennies to create -- which is why he thinks they "will save the world." He's even got his eye on a second Nobel Prize.
Ashkin's lifelong fascination with light has already saved countless lives. He shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing a tiny object-levitating technology called optical tweezers, which is essentially a powerful laser beam that can "catch very small things," as Ashkin describes it. Optical tweezers can hold and stretch DNA, thereby helping us probe some of the biggest mysteries of life. [...] Ashkin has already filed the necessary patent paperwork (he holds at least 47 patents to date) for his new invention, but said he isn't ready to share photos of the concentrators with the public just yet. Soon, he hopes to publish his results in the journal Science.
Ashkin's lifelong fascination with light has already saved countless lives. He shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics for his role in inventing a tiny object-levitating technology called optical tweezers, which is essentially a powerful laser beam that can "catch very small things," as Ashkin describes it. Optical tweezers can hold and stretch DNA, thereby helping us probe some of the biggest mysteries of life. [...] Ashkin has already filed the necessary patent paperwork (he holds at least 47 patents to date) for his new invention, but said he isn't ready to share photos of the concentrators with the public just yet. Soon, he hopes to publish his results in the journal Science.
you still need to capture light from a large area to get more power.
If the patent doesn't tell the story, then it should never have been granted. If he has a patent, then what's the number? Without that, we have nothing to talk about. (I'd try to find it, but I'm on a small and slow tablet.)
That he won't show it off, though, is a good indication that it doesn't actually work. Since he allegedly has a patent on it already, he has nothing to lose by showing it to us. Either he doesn't actually have a patent, or he doesn't actually have a working invention.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
So it has to work, right?
If the patent doesn't tell the story, then it should never have been granted. If he has a patent, then what's the number?
It says he filed the paperwork. It doesn't say the patent has been granted. Presumably he wants to keep it under wraps until he actually has the patent in hand which is reasonable.
Old dude invents mirrors!
Just doesn't have the same click-baity ring to it, now does it?
you still need to capture light from a large area to get more power.
See, even though I have a Nobel in physics, I come here to Slashdot so that I can be schooled by web programmers and app developers and middle managers on what I need to do.
It's too bad Slashdot doesn't have a larger audience because of all you could solve all the World's problems in just a few posts.
When you are lost the light may guide you, or maybe not. Still many will follow only to be disappointed in the end but was fun while the suspense lasts.
everybody is looking for technological salvation... the only clean energy is to simply use less... Gaviotas in Colombia was already working on clever ways to harness energy. http://www.friendsofgaviotas.o...
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
I have been under the impression that the problem with solar as a power source wasn't the collection or direction of light but the conversion process itself, no? If that is the case, how do intensifiers or collectors help with this? Efficiency gains in collection are only going to be incremental and not Nobel Prize worthy paradigm shifts, right? The real prize is in conversion. Correct my thinking here.
There are huge power plants in existence today that use solar "concentrators" and "geometric" mirrors to "gather light" and focus it on "cheap metal tubes" for the purpose of making steam to drive a turbine.
What has this guy done that is novel?
Is this anything like building a panel with hundreds of tiny magnifying glasses on it so that it is cheaper to build? The energy for every square inch of panel is focused into tiny areas that can more cheaply convert the concentrated solar energy into electrical energy. In other words, today it costs X dollars to build a panel with Y sq. ft. that produces Z watts peak. With this technology you can build the same Y and Z for a cheaper X? Or you can build a bigger Y and Z for the same X?
So you can't admit that you said "It's easier to land on Mars than Melbourne, Australia" now? Do you not remember saying that or are you lying because it was so embarrassing to be confronted with your bullshit?
25-30 years is not the "least" in terms of replacement windows for existing cheap panels. Sorry. You don't know what you're blathering about, again.
And Mars is not easier to get to than Melbourne. I've been to Melbourne. It's nice.
Damn, you stole my snarky comment.
Back in the early days, when Arco was running the test farm for what I think were the first for-the-general-market solar panels (the famous "Arco Panels" of early Renewable Energy hobbiests of the day), one of the things they tried was concentrators.
I think the idea was to see of they could get away with half the area of (then very expensive) single-crystal cells - and was tested with the same prototype panels with the concentrator . The concentrator sat on the top of of the panel and focused the light that would have hit a whole cell into a square in the center of it, of about half the area.
The result convinced them that they were ahead to just use more then-very-expensive panels. With modern dirt-cheap high-efficiency panels, I'd expect the economics would be even more weighted toward the just-panels solution. So this guy has a steeper hill to climb.
One problem with a concentrator is that raising the insolation also raises the heating. Solar panels get less efficient as it gets hotter. So doubling or tripling the light hitting it does NOT double or triple the power. But it DOES increase any degradation of the cells.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One problem with a concentrator is that raising the insolation also raises the heating. Solar panels get less efficient as it gets hotter. So doubling or tripling the light hitting it does NOT double or triple the power. But it DOES increase any degradation of the cells.
On the other hand, one of the degradations Arco panels had was a sun-induced darkening of the adhesive between the cells and the glass. The concentrators increased this, too - cutting the already short lifetime in half. This might have been the key driver for the no-concentrators decision. (A better adhesive that didn't discolor over decades was one of the first improvements in solar panels.)
Still, you can do the concentrator thing, at least with panels that track the seasons, with two slanted flat mirrors, and I haven't seen that for decades.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Solar concentration powergen has been tried and proved to be so environmentally reckless that it is now considered a non-starter, and it is in fact illegal to issue a construction permit for solar concentration powergen in 8 states - California was the first to ban them.
The problem is that solar concentration complexes literally fry anything alive that happens to stray into their concentrated beams of light, including insects, birds, and yes, people. In one such plant that is still operating in Arizona (until its permit expires in 2020, which is not being renewed), plant employees call them 'streamers,' birds that are set on fire mid-flight and die an agonizing death as they fall to the ground leaving a stream of smoke behind them from their burning flesh - literally cooked alive mid-flight.
Some estimate that over 100,000 birds die every year at one plant alone, which devastates the local ecosystem. The birds are attracted to the radiant heat that is given off by the boiler tower, and so they fly towards it, into the light, and die. Were one of these plants to be built in a more lush area, the ecological devastation could not even be measured.
These things have already done more damage than all of the nuclear accidents in history combined. They have killed more mass of living beings than the Holocaust.
This guy should be locked up for life for even considering this technology.
Posting to cancel an erroneous moderation. I hate clicky touchpads...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
this stuff will be overkill.
I agree with your comments about the difficulty of using concentrators.
Also, solar panels have become so cheap, they represent only a third of the cost of a residential installation. For a 5kW system that costs about $15,000 installed, the wholesale price of the panels is about $5000. The rest is labor, inverters, racking, permits, sales and marketing, profit, etc.
Even if the cost of the concentrators + modules in the new solution reduces module costs by 2/3rds, the total installation would drop from $15k to $11.7k, not bad, but it won't revolutionize the entire industry, either.
It is highly unlikely that a 2/3rd cost reduction is achievable based on the problems you outlined above.
That means installation large enough to power the average home (10399 kWh/yr / 8766 hours/yr = 1186 Watts) is about 1866 W / 25.5 W/m^2 = 73 m^2 or a 12.8 kW system (55 m^2 in the desert Southwest, 9.7 kW). Although that's based on an average - you'll have a shortage of power in winter, so will probably need an even bigger PV installation to get you off the grid year-round.
That quantity of PV panels costs several tens of thousands of dollars. On the other hand, a reflector/concentrator that size can be made for a few tens of dollars. Though the added bulk will increase the mounting and maintenance costs. So you can see where the guy in TFA is going with this. (I left out cost of mounting and voltage regulation circuitry since I figured it'd be about the same for both cases.)
The other option is to just allow plants/algae to collect solar energy. They use it to convert sunlight, CO2, and H2O into sugar, starches (sugar molecules glued together), and wood (starch molecules glued together). You can then use those as fuel. The efficiency is much lower (around 1% or less). But plants grow and reproduce on their own, so manufacturing cost is zero (negative in cases like weeds where we're actively trying to prevent the plants from growing). You only have to pay for harvesting and processing. Human global energy consumption is about 170,000 TWh per year, which at 8766 hours/yr is 19.4 TW. The rate at which energy is stored chemically by photosynthesis worldwide is estimated to be several hundred TW.
Within various professional society memberships, Ashkin attained the rating of fellow in the Optical Society of America (OSA), the American Physical Society (APS), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He retired from Bell Labs in 1992 after a 40-year career during which he contributed to many areas of experimental physics. He authored many research papers over the years and holds 47 patents. He was recipient of the Joseph F. Keithley Award For Advances in Measurement Science in 2003 and the Harvey Prize in 2004. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1984 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1996. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2013. Currently, he continues work in his home lab.
Besides optical tweezers, Ashkin is also known for his studies in photorefraction, second harmonic generation, and non-linear optics in fibers.
Recent advances in physics and biology using optical micromanipulation include achievement of Bose–Einstein condensation in atomic vapors at submillikelvin temperatures, demonstration of atom lasers, and detailed measurements on individual motor molecules.
Ashkin's work formed the basis for Steven Chu's work on cooling and trapping atoms, which earned Chu the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics.
Nobel Prize - On October 2, 2018, Arthur Ashkin was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on optical trapping, sharing it with Donna Strickland and Gérard Mourou who received the other half of that year's prize. Ashkin "was honored for his invention of 'optical tweezers' that grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells with their laser beam fingers. With this he was able to use the radiation pressure of light to move physical objects, 'an old dream of science fiction', the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said."
At 96, he is the oldest Nobel Prize laureate to be awarded the prize. Ashkin was awarded half of the Prize while the other half was shared between Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their work on chirped-pulse amplification, a technique "now used in laser machining [that] enables doctors to perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries every year".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It's not just a heat problem.
Concentrating the light more or less requires sun tracking. And sun tracking is very expensive vs cheap, efficient (enough), static panels.
This cost advantage for static panels is only going to increase over time. The cost to track the sun is not going to improve but the cheap static panels are getting more efficient and less costly all the time. Static panels are so cheap that other system costs come to dominate.
Concentrated solar is a dead end.
This sounds like a reinvention of non-imaging optics. The Wikipedia article even cites concentration of solar energy as its first application. The other current application are the "light tubes" that help pipe sunlight into otherwise dark spaces that aren't suitable for windows and skylights. This just sounds like another old physicist going off the rails and reinventing some well-known technology.
2003 device, so I don't think he's getting a noble for this.
https://www.israel21c.org/scientists-harness-sunlight-to-replace-medical-lasers/
I know this guy has a Nobel in physics and I don't, but I've spent a really long time in the solar business, mostly in R&D but also on the financial side, and even have some direct experience with concentrators. This article is mostly puff, but still something about the guy's claims seem off to me.
It would be easy to say, "yeah, the guy's got a Nobel, but he's 96 years old," and write it off to some sort of senility or dementia. The article does not give me the feeling that's what's happening.
It would also be easy to say that the idea of concentrating light for solar energy has been around for a long time and assume that he can't possibly have an original idea on the topic. I can't say whether he really has an original idea, but I can say that if it simply collects direct sunlight from a large area and focuses it onto a small area, it doesn't matter if the reflectors and/or lenses can be made for free, the economics probably will not pan out (and at the very least, it will not be the clear-cut universal solution to cheap energy that he seems to think he has). If it does something new -- collect both direct and diffuse light and focus it on a small area, or shift wavelengths so the light that reaches the solar cell can be used more efficiently -- then maybe he's on to something. Simple, non-concentrating solar using flat-plate panels is already so cheap, though, that I'm not sure that even that will bring a clear-cut economic case, especially if the reflectors can't handle things like heavy wind or snow.
Which brings me to my final thought: I suspect this guy is working with an outdated version of solar economics in his head and simply doesn't understand the current market. He clearly knows his stuff as a physicist, so unless he is senile this seems like the most likely scenario to me. I won't rule out that he has some revolutionary idea, but even if he does, the economic impact it can have is limited simply because the costs he can cut are already low. There's a certain way in which this reminds me of article I read where somebody invents a near-perfect antireflection coating and thinks they're going to revolutionize solar cells, which already have such a low reflectance that there is little to be gained there, especially if the new technology is not essentially free.
Fuck off, ya racist troll! From his Wiki:
"At 96, he is the oldest Nobel Prize laureate to be awarded the prize. Ashkin was awarded half of the Prize while the other half was shared between Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland for their work on chirped-pulse amplification, a technique "now used in laser machining [that] enables doctors to perform millions of corrective laser eye surgeries every year"."
It permits further development without disclosure which might enable competitors to beat you to the punch.
If he's smart enough to win a Nobel he might be smart enough to do a risk/benefit analysis.
https://www.heerlaw.com/benefi...
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
My first thought when reading this was, "if this was possible, than somebody else would probably already have done it." Then it occurred to me that people like Arthur Ashkin are the "somebody else" who probably would come up with it. If anyone is likely to come up with a revolutionary improvement on photovoltaic technology, it would be a nobel prize winning scientist specialized in light manipulation.
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
Was fun reading through the comments, so many experts! I don't profess to be but I do know how to Google and I'm surprised nobody has gone through what's right and wrong about his patent and how it could pertain to better PV performance. The only thing I take away is how bulky the apparatus appears to be and also there's a ring design for using the energy for heating; although direction to a single PC is also mentioned.
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120138047A1/en
"If it were simply a better magnifying glass, he would not be claiming to have applied for a patent, ..."
WTF do you think patents are for?? That is the exact purpose for a patent, to protect things like solar concentrator designs.
You are conflating new science, which can win you a Nobel prize, with commercial and technological advancements, which are protected by patents.
This guy has done both. You, with your confused view of reality, I'll bet you've done neither. I've done neither too. But at least I know the difference between the purpose of a Nobel Prize and a patent!
All your bleating about "appeals to authority" and "scientific skepticism is required" and "extraordinary claims", it's all bullshit. And yeah, the winner of a Nobel Prize, who holds 47 patents, and makes an entirely reasonable (not F'n extraordinary) claim? He gets the benefit of the doubt. Not you.
Old guy attempts to remain relevant in modern age by working on a solar concentrator, makes premature promises of unlimited green energy. Fails to mention the vast space required for his possible future invention to fulfill his premature promises.