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Solar Powered Chemical Processing
evileconboy writes "I found a great story about the creation of artificial porphyrin-based molecules that can absorb light like chlorophyll. The molecules absorb photons from porphyrin "antannae" charging a buckyball which acts like an acceptor. Apparently, the scientists want to use the molecule to drive other reactions. But I wouldn't be surprised if they could create a type of efficient, artificial leaf-like solar panel with these molecules. Forget silicon or other gallium based photovoltaic cells! "
A way to run my Mickey Mouse Clock without having to resort to the entire fascist system of "batteries."
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RumorsDaily
Nifty fusions of the biological and industrial are the kind of things Bruce Sterling sees replacing smokestack industries. (Decentralized Vats of Vidridian Goop industries?)
Check out Janine M. Benyus' book _Biomimicry_ for more info on this kind of stuff.
This is just the sort of thing I want to hear. Embed those puppies in my skin! I want to be green and foodless by the year 2020 goddammit!
But seriously, this is great news. Considering the shamefully small amount of money that goes into researching renewable sources of energy, I'm always delighted when they hit a new breakthrough. Solar is especially attractive - imagine running your entire home off a refrigerator-sized panel adhered to the roof. Total personal independence!
Unfortunately, there are severe limits at the moment. I recently looked into roofing a home with solar panels. Turns out that it would cost around $20k to be self-sufficient (and then only just barely). I worked it out, and it seems that with my monthly electricity costs, it would take me 103 years to pay that off.
http://www.mcn.org/a/mendom otive/Products/Unisolar2.htm
The trouble is that even the theoretical output of solar cells is low. It's bounded severely by the surface area because of the limitations of the diode materials available to us today. Turns out that even if you have full light shining on the surface, you can only get about 29% efficiency - and that's theoretical. In reality, it's less. Here's a site that explains the technical details:
http://www.nrel.gov/ncpv/documents/ pvpaper.html
Now, I have heard some clever ideas for increasing the efficiency. For example, one team discovered purely by accident that they could increase surface area by making the silicon layer extremely "spikey" on a microscopic level. The sunlight bounces around inside the spikes and is more likely to ultimately by trapped by a cell.
I think the theoretical number they cited was 40% efficiency, but right now that's still vaporware.
I wonder whether some slashdotter is brave enough to post the original ACS paper. I don't have access. I'd love to see what efficiency numbers these people are touting. Anybody?
-konstant
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Now I can finally make use of all of these buckyballs I created while I was a Chemical Engineer major at MSU. I have to work on getting these integrated with my UPS...
Does anybody know if they tried this with the other isotopes (C-70, C-120, C-160, etc.)? C-60 is the most common, but I wonder what effects this process would have if they used larger buckyballs.
Here is the Nobel Prize in Chemistry given for the discovery of carbon atoms in a ball. It shows how you can make your own and play ball with them.
If they absorb light, cant that be transfered into starch somewhere :) Then the starch could be turned into sugar, add your fav additives and aritifical coloring + carbonated water + high fructose + caramel color + phosphoric acid + caffeine and you have reinvented Coca Cola (minus X)
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Geoff Ryman's excellent novel The Child Garden had our green-skinned descendents photosynthisising (sp?), and Ed Regis' Nano predicted the nanosuit that'd supply all our energy needs.
God, I love buckyballs. They can do anything. A beowulf cluster of these'd probably outcalculate Deep Thought.
If you want to get more output, look into solar furnaces as a way of charging you home batterys, you can get alot of power this way.
Hello! I am Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die
1. How suitable is this material for mass production ?
2. How much power can be generated per unit area ? I'd like to see the "theoretical maximum" and the actual measure of the current material. This would allow elementary comparisons between solar collector's and chlorophyll. This sounds like a great breakthrough, but exactly how good is it compared to what we have ?
3. What frequencies can the material respond to ? This question could be important to the space program, if materials can be made that convert even a fraction of the radiation from the sun to usable energy there could be a great saving in mission mass requirements ? This could come from simply replacing inert shielding with this material, thus you eliminate some power generation/fuel requirements, making the whole mission more efficient. Using this material as the membrane of a solar sail would be doubly effective, deriving propulsion as well as any energy requirements.
4. My previous inquiries beg the question, What is the tensile strength of this material ? How malleable is it ?
Again it is clear the technology is far from ready for prime time, but the possiblities are exciting.
Don't post innacurate information
If you do, I swear by my pretty floral bonnet I will end you.
(*)- Yes I'm aware you could create a system to generate a system that say generates ATP, and then uses the ATP to fuel a reductase or oxidase in order to run an electrolytic cell. This sort of system may work well for biological systems which have power consumptions on the order of 120 W (this is based on energy requirements of 2500 Kcal/day, fyi 1 Calorie in the nutrional sense equals 1000 calories in the biological sense). Photosynthetic systems work great in biology since plants concentrate energy over long periods of time, e.g. it takes 3-4 months to generate the energy required to produce a couple ears of corn.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Is it possible to reverse the reaction to get a light-emitting device? Existing light sources are notoriously inefficient - most of the energy ends up as heat, instead of light.
Once you've got the pophyrins handing the electrons off to the buckyballs, why not connect the buckyballs to a chemical "wire" which is in turn connected to a metallic wire? Then you run the electrons through an external circuit (which they power), and back to the pophyrins.
The cell voltage (under light load) will be the voltage difference up which the pophyrins can push the electron (probably about the electron-volt equivalent of the associated photon), less any potential-differences the electron must travel getting from the buckys to the negative wire and from the positive wire back to the pophyrins.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
(Babelfished english->portugese->english->italian->english->fre nch->english->spanish->english)
:0)(not) i ght-light-light-light-light-light-light- light-harvesting of molecules had been a day degree to provide to these means to the solar-solar-solar-solar-solar-solar-solar-solar-so lar-solar-solar-solar-solar-solar-solar- solar-powered process of chemistry. Light of the sun of her maintenance of the hour of I of green of factories in the energy with photosynthesis -- a process of the imitation in the laboratory. The photosyntheses with the factories - the conversion of dioxide and the water of the coal in energy-rich person of the sugar - appear in cloroplasti the calls of scompartimenti in the slight ones. The light is absorbed of that one " for the antenna of molecules ": it dyes that they contribute to block the light with visible the complete shipment of the ghost. These disc molecules, battery with ' in a demanded photosystem ', subsidy to channel the absorbent energy in a molecule of the chlorophyll in the center of the fotosintetico of the reaction in the heart of the photosystem he.
I didn't quite understand that article so i babelfished it...now I got it
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Or and chemistries had constructed a molecule that imitated the capacity with the green ones of factories to block light of the sun and to use the energy for the photosyntheses. The so artificial light-light-light-light-light-light-light-light-l
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I don't know which books I enjoy most, those who keeps me awake, or those that makes me sleep. -Benjamin Disraeli
Welcome to Slashdot. Please don't feed the trolls.
(Oops. Made a consistent typo in the above post.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This is exciting, but all the specifics will have to change before you get a practical application of this tech.
1. Manufacturability: These guys have connected 3 molecules of porphyrin to "conducting arms" and to a fourth "custom modified" porphyrin with a buckyball on it. That's a whole lot of custom reactions. Even if you could run these reactions in a vat instead of a test tube, there have to be at least a few of them where the maximum theoretical yield is pretty low.
2. Efficiency: as the article explained, real photosynthesis has to hand the electrons off many times before it can get useful work out of them. Things may get easier when you want electrons out the end instead of ATP, but this is still only the first step. And even in this step, you've already lost a lot of the energy. The reason a buckyball ion is so stable is that the charge distributes over 60 atoms of carbon. The electron is pretty happy there - it doesn't have a whole lot of oomph left to power your [wearable beowulf cluster].
Sure, this reaction may help us understand the chemistry of modified photosyntheses, but in the long run, I'd bet that the first green photocells will crib a lot more from life than just one part of one molecule. In other words, the pure chemists have to start talking to the genetic engineers a lot more than these ones have.
Preferential Voting: easy as 1-2-3
It would be great if this could be used in Space. Perhaps someday it will be, but there are likely to be significant problems.
Most carbon based material that I have looked at for space use (such as Kevlar(tm)) gets degraded by ultraviolet light.
We were looking at building space station modules 10 meters in diameter, shaped as soccer balls (truncated icosahedrons), and connected into benzine ring shaped structures. The outer kevlar(tm) fabric that provided the tensile strength had to be aluminized to retard the UV degradation.
Morris
I scanned the messages already posted and saw no information on this, so I figured I would field the question: I am sure this is a positive step forward towards alternative photocells, but how easily are the buckyballs synthesized? You would need something on an industrial scale, not microscale, to make this applicable.
Now, all of the cars you drive will be semi-metallic green. The only missing ingredient is rain, that is "acid rain". The combination of the two should produce quite a charge
In one of his future histories, sci-fi author and all-around opinionated guy Robert A. Heinlein described some scientists who invented highly efficient bioluminescent chemicals (turned energy into light) and quickly figured out that it worked the other way around as well. So, they patented their idea, and licensed it to anyone who wanted at the rate of a couple bucks per panel. Result: billions of people get a renewable energy source for peanuts, and a few scientests get filthy rich.
Buckyballs aren't that hard to make, as it turns out. I'm not sure what the state of the art is, but you can get reasonable lab-scale quantities from an electric arc and a carbon rod. That process probably scales well, if/when we are given a reason to make lots of buckyballs....
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= John Reinert Nash -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
The web site that reported the story based it on a bad citation. I checked out JACS, and did not find the article. Kinda bad if a magazine like Nature does that.
Benyus's book isn't bad, but she needlessly invents a new term, biomimicry, when the perfectly good "bionics" (original meaning) has been around for decades.
(And yes, the less-complete dictionaries only list the definition of bionics popularized by "The Six Million Dollar Man", i.e. machinery replacing/augmenting the organism, but the original definition was the study of biological systems. To quote Martin Caidin's "Cyborg" (which inspired the TV show):
"The term itself, bionics, still found ready understanding within only a limited area. Originally it was coined by Major Jack E. Steele, who had been a research psychiatrist at the Aerospace Research Laboratory in Ohio. . . . He created the word bionics as a combination of the Greek bios, meaning life, and the suffix ics, meaning after the manner of, or resembling. Steele taught his coworkers that the scientific goal of bionics was to acquire specific biological knowledge, then reduce that knowledge to mathematical terms (again with the indispensable computers) that would be meaningful to an engineer, who would then produce what the doctors, or the bionicists, if the term was preferred, requested."
(I happen to know all this since Dr. Steele (now Colonel, retired) is my father-in-law.)
(And a rev iew of "Cyborg" suggests Martin Caidin may be the first user of term cyborg -- from which word of course derives the name of the Star Trek Borg.)
-- Alastair
(off topic and unrepentant) - anyone know of a place to rent "solar-powered web-server space"? (Y2K ready!8P) I'd pay a premium to get off the grid. It'd also buy post-industrial bragging rights. Reputation Management! We're talkin' about an exciting business opportunity here:)
Greenstar is uber cool, but not quite for right this. KTAO broadcasts a solar-powered 50,000 watt radio signal from atop a New Mexico mountain, but no backbone connect:/.. I'd try it w/ my DSL at home, but my landlord won't have it:\.. any leads?
Can't wait to photosynthesize. This seems like a good first step...
Many computations don't require lightning-fast processes. We ought to look
into making many processes run through chemical catylists and handled by the
cells of the body. Phactories and Pharms could handle their own
computations using chemical process. Information can be stored on protein
nucleotide "tapes" written by DNA-like printers. Many solar and battery
personal devices could be run on this system, with much less demand for
electricity. It would be easy to harness motion to power such devices, as
well. A small, fast processor and memory card could be used for
communications and math-intensive processes and memory that needs to be
readily available. Wearables should give way to more integrated devices
that are almost indistinguishable from the individual. Use is first nature,
not second.
Working on a piece of fiction that paralells this:
http://thinktank.knoggin.com/th inc/pages/pharmboy.htm
Free Film project anyone?
I thought they were made just by
letting carbon atoms find stable
forms in vacuum.
So how the .. do bean rizomes make ammonia. Should be impossible. Wonder what would happen if you resonate those buckballs..