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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.
TFS says he's filed the patent paperwork, not that he's been granted the patent. Let's wait for that process, and maybe the published results in Science before we rush to judgement. But you are correct in that this is kind of a non-story until then.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Normal PV cells are more efficient the cooler they are, though attempts at water cooling them have given disappointing levels of improvement. They also run pretty hot without concentrators, anything more than 2-3x concentration is going to be difficult and probably seriously life shortening. What would be useful is an omnidirectional concentrator with no moving parts, either capturing light longer across the day or for something robust like solar steam generation.
I don't have much use for thermal generation in my climate, PV at least struggles on during low light conditions and a concentrator could help.
Still, others have tried so maybe there's something here. But it smells off.
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.
I hope that's not it. The thing in that patent looks like a decidedly bulky concentrator that actually needs a mechanism to track the sun. And concentrators which funnel light from a large area into a small one aren't that useful for PV panels: you're better off putting more panels in the area taken up by the concentrator, plus concentrating light onto panels will heat them up and reduce their efficiency.
Now if it's something that makes PV panels more or less omnidirectional, he could be on to something. But modern panels already do quite well on that score, IIRC they lose only around 15-20% of output when the sun is 45 degrees away from the optimal angle, on properly positioned panels.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Some reading for you.
As you already have a mountain of comments stating the paperwork is done for the patent but it hasn't gotten back yet, however for inventions that are simple and cheap to make, often means they are also really easy to copy. He is working out of his basement, a simple picture, could mean a large corporation can get the idea and mass produce them without completed paperwork. And facing one man against a big corporation in general means he lost a lot of research.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Even if he is granted a patent, that's no indication that it works as well as he hopes that it does. A patent is just an indication that he's created a novel invention. Nothing about a patent says that novel invention is actually useful. People get patents for cat litter boxes, they're nothing special in and of themselves.
I think his point is that you have to develop different ways of doing things when you get to a much larger scale, for instance the connectors and safeties that work at 20MW don't directly scale to 200MW. You have to make changes. Like many things, "scaling up" doesn't just mean you have the same setup only bigger.
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?
Well, for instance, the solar panels on the market today have efficiency ratings between about 15 and 22 percent. Additionally in the lab there have been examples of panels which were as much as 40% efficient.
The cost of panels tend to reflect their efficiency. You'll pay more for a 22% efficient panel than for a 15% efficient one. If the 40% efficient ones could be mass produced it's safe to assume they would be even more expensive.
If you can have cheap intensifiers then you don't need to buy as many panels. If you need fewer panels then maybe you can afford more expensive ones. If your intensifier has the same surface area as your neighbours non-intensified 15% efficient array, but you are focusing the sunlight hitting that surface onto a much smaller 40% efficient array, you're actually producing twice as much energy as he is, hopefully at a comparable cost.
That's an overly simplistic analysis for sure; how well it actually works in real life will depend on all kinds of factors which I can't possibly fully know right now. But that's the general idea ... if you can focus light cheaply, you can have a more efficient system at a lower cost.
Yes, but let's look at the details. It takes around 10k USD in patent attorney fees to file the simplest of patents, 30-100k is more typical. Trying to do them yourself is a recipe for disaster as you broadcast your ideas without substantial protections. Patent attorneys are so expansive because they need a law degree and typically have a degree in the field they are writing the patent for, so in this case physics or engineering. After your 65k initial investment, if your idea or product becomes popular, many companies will start to copy it which is where defending your IP comes in. It's first to file so he may either be a reason other patents are denied or can start sending cease and desist letters to any offenders.
Contrary to popular belief, patent law cases are far less about being right or wrong than simply using superior legal firepower to overwhelm your opponent. A small company sending a cease and desist to another small company may bleed them into stopping, this won't work against large companies. Against a company like Apple, Samsung, or a university with a law college you will massively lose 98% of the time unless you have similar resources to fight. A good patent challenge starts at around 500k and can easily climb past tens of millions USD in fees you keep needing to pay up front. This overwhelms any small company or inventor and they are cooked. That's why most small companies and inventors simply skip the patent and try to stay on top with nimble innovation (a competitive advantage for the small entity) and through obscurity. The system is really broken.
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
Why would he have to pay up front? If he would be in the right, a lawyer would probably jump at the chance to be paid on commission, as long as the payoff was big enough.
If a big company makes millions trying to use his patent pending system, once the patent comes in, he can sue them for all of that. Yeah, probably nearly half would have to go to his lawyers but he'd still be ahead of the game in the end.
Plus, that big company would have done all of the hard work of getting his product out there and recognized for him, so he wouldn't have to be starting from scratch once he got the patent approved.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'