From Stanford University , the first carbon sequestration project that makes energy. I wonder, will Al Gore say the electricity produced by a carbon solar cell is “dirty energy”? Somewhere, off in the distance, I hear Joe Romm’s head exploding.
Stanford scientists build the first all-carbon solar cell
Stanford University scientists have built the first solar cell made entirely of carbon, a promising alternative to the expensive materials used in photovoltaic devices today.
The results are published in the Oct. 31 online edition of the journal ACS Nano.
“Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost,” said study senior author Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a working solar cell that has all of the components made of carbon. This study builds on previous work done in our lab.”
Unlike rigid silicon solar panels that adorn many rooftops, Stanford’s thin film prototype is made of carbon materials that can be coated from solution. “Perhaps in the future we can look at alternative markets where flexible carbon solar cells are coated on the surface of buildings, on windows or on cars to generate electricity,” Bao said.
The coating technique also has the potential to reduce manufacturing costs, said Stanford graduate student Michael Vosgueritchian, co-lead author of the study with postdoctoral researcher Marc Ramuz.
“Processing silicon-based solar cells requires a lot of steps,” Vosgueritchian explained. “But our entire device can be built using simple coating methods that don’t require expensive tools and machines.”
Carbon nanomaterials
The Bao group’s experimental solar cell consists of a photoactive layer, which absorbs sunlight, sandwiched between two electrodes. In a typical thin film solar cell, the electrodes are made of conductive metals and indium tin oxide (ITO). “Materials like indium are scarce and becoming more expensive as the demand for solar cells, touchscreen panels and other electronic devices grows,” Bao said. “Carbon, on the other hand, is low cost and Earth-abundant.”
For the study, Bao and her colleagues replaced the silver and ITO used in conventional electrodes with graphene – sheets of carbon that are one atom thick –and single-walled carbon nanotubes that are 10,000 times narrower than a human hair. “Carbon nanotubes have extraordinary electrical conductivity and light-absorption properties,” Bao said.
For the active layer, the scientists used material made of carbon nanotubes and “buckyballs” – soccer ball-shaped carbon molecules just one nanometer in diameter. The research team recently filed a patent for the entire device.
“Every component in our solar cell, from top to bottom, is made of carbon materials,” Vosgueritchian said. “Other groups have reported making all-carbon solar cells, but they were referring to just the active layer in the middle, not the electrodes.”
One drawback of the all-carbon prototype is that it primarily absorbs near-infrared wavelengths of light, contributing to a laboratory efficiency of less than 1 percent – much lower than commercially available solar cells. “We clearly have a long way to go on efficiency,” Bao said. “But with better materials and better processing techniques, we expect that the efficiency will go up quite dramatically.”
Improving efficiency
The Stanford team is looking at a variety of ways to improve efficiency. “Roughness can short-circuit the device and make it hard to collect the current,” Bao said. “We have to figure out how to make each layer very smooth by stacking the nanomaterials really well.”
The researchers are also experimenting with carbon nanomaterials that can absorb more light in a broader range of wavelengths, including the visible spectrum.
“Materials made of carbon are very robust,” Bao said. “They remain stable in air temperatures of nearly 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit.”
The ability of carbon solar cells to out-perform conventional devices under extreme conditions could overcome the need for greater efficiency, according to Vosgueritchian. “We believe that all-carbon solar cells could be used in extreme environments, such as at high temperatures or at high physical stress,” he said. “But obviously we want the highest efficiency possible and are working on ways to improve our device.”
“Photovoltaics will definitely be a very important source of power that we will tap into in the future,” Bao said. “We have a lot of available sunlight. We’ve got to figure out some way to use this natural resource that is given to us.”
Other authors of the study are Peng Wei of Stanford and Chenggong Wang and Yongli Gao of the University of Rochester Department of Physics and Astronomy. The research was funded by the Global Climate and Energy Project at Stanford and the Air Force Office for Scientific Research.
This article was written by Mark Shwartz of the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University.
Source: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/october/carbon-solar-cell-103112.html
An IR photovoltaic cell capable of withstanding high temperatures would be ideal as a waste heat to energy converter. Wrap them around all the bits of power plants and HVAC systems that generate or lose heat. Fit them all over the exhaust systems of vehicles.
Get the IR efficiency high enough and eliminate the alternator.
As for companies buying patents to “kill” inventions. Patents expire… and people forget. Lots of good technology has been buried via that process. A bigger company doesn’t want to be challenged by a better version from a smaller company so they try one or more tactics to squash the competition.
1. Buy the patent or production rights then do absolutely nothing with it. By the time the expiration date comes along, few people remember it existed. Even if the contract forces the purchaser to actually produce what was bought, make it in limited numbers and “forget” to publish/advertise it’s being made. Eventually the lawyers will come up with a loophole due to “lack of sales” to stop production.
2. Buy the competitor out completely then do absolutely nothing with everything just bought.
3. If 1 and 2 fail, sue them for some sort of infringement, copyright, trademark, patent, whatever. Throw everything against the wall and go with what sticks.
Number 3 has been used many many times. Until Philo Farnsworth refused to back down on television, RCA routinely did all three methods to obtain the inventions they wanted and squash the ones they didn’t want as competition. The patent for all electronic television was the first one RCA had ever had to *license* and pay royalties on instead of somehow obtaining outright ownership.
More recently there was a small company that invented a device that could cure cancers of bone marrow like leukemia. It worked by filtering a sample of the sick person’s bone marrow so that only healthy cells were left, then cultured the healthy cells until there were enough to do an allograft type “transplant”. The patient then underwent the same procedure as during a regular marrow transplant. Kill all their marrow then inject the healthy cells which colonize the bones. The system worked very well.
A large medical company didn’t like that one bit so they knocked together a similar but inferior system, filed a patent on it then claimed the small company “stole” their technology. The big guys threw enough lawyers and money into it and they won, getting the court to award all the technology and assets of the small company to the big company. The small company put together and shipped out as many of the kits as they could before the deadline to help as many people as they could, including the inventor of the system – he had developed leukemia.
After all was done, the big company squashed the little guys and AFAIK that marrow purification and culturing system has stayed deeply buried. There’s far more money in *treatment* and *management* of chronic diseases instead of actually curing them, which makes them no longer chronic.
In the 1940’s and 1950’s there was a battery technology that you likely haven’t heard of. Wet Cell Nickle Cadmium. One major use of them was in military aircraft. Their stainless steel cases were very tough and the construction of the batteries proved very rugged. They could be left discharged for a long time then charged up and would perform with no loss of capacity as happens to a discharged lead-acid battery. The US military left huge numbers of those batteries in Europe after WW2. Farmers used them on their trucks and tractors because they’d last for years. I’ve seen reports of bad vehicle crashes where the only salvageable part was one of those war surplus aircraft batteries.
Union Carbide had American manufacturing and sales rights on the technology but made only token efforts at manufacturing and sales. Why make nearly indestructible wet cell NiCd batteries when inferior lead-acid batteries would last only 2 or 3 years, assuring frequent replacement? Other American battery companies announced back then that they were going to produce those batteries, but nothing came of it.
No “conspiracy theory” need apply. When it cones down to the money, it’s often not in a companies best financial interest to produce the absolute best product possible.
Case in point, plastic chicken boards. Commercial production buildings for chickens used to use galvanized steel panels on the floors called chicken boards (probably named after the wood boards originally used). Chicken poo is very corrosive and the steel panels would rust. Some guy got the bright idea to make chicken boards out of PVC, sized and shaped to be a direct replacement for the metal ones. Sales went extremely well for several years then dropped to almost nothing. After checking their records the company found they had sold their indestructible product to every chicken and egg producer in the USA whose buildings used that design of chicken boards. They done sold themselves out of business! Being smart fellows they quickly shifted to designing and producing many other plastic products.
Had they been of the same sort as companies that deliberately design products that *could* last for decades or centuries to fail in mere years, they could have stayed in business forever with the chicken boards by designing them to last only 25~50% longer than the galvanized steel versions.
zootcadillac says:
October 31, 2012 at 5:55 pm
“There is no harm in sourcing alternative energies to fossil fuels.”
There is harm in it if you use tax-payers money. Because then a commitee of morons will decide which projects are to get money. And the goal of the project will be how to get money from the government, not how to earn money on the product.
Dan in California says:
October 31, 2012 at 2:08 pm
“Or, you could just go buy flexible solar panels or roof tiles now. One source is UniSolar, http://www.uni-solar.com/ but get them soon, because UniSolar is having hard financial times. It seems in the real world, sales depend on market demand and value of the product.”
That is so true. And that is the explanation on why the greenies are always fascists at heart. They cannot support democracy and capitalism. Because capitalism has an automatic feedback loop on finding the most efficient power source.
So at about 1% they are at the low end of photosynthesis, but don’t have the built in fuel production / energy storage…
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/458172/photosynthesis/60563/Energy-efficiency-of-photosynthesis
So with about an order of magnitude improvement in efficiency and a dramatic reduction in costs, they might be competitive with sugar cane… (the bagasse is burned to provide electrical power and heat to sugar refining…)
@Lucy Skywalker:
One professor Hegelstein at M.I.T. claims to have LENR working and a lab demo. Teaches a class on it IIRC. Not a lot available from “academic” sources, but a YouTube video and some lectures by him exists.
http://coldfusionnow.org/massachusetts-state-sen-bruce-tarr-visits-still-operating-jet-energy-nanor-demo/
M.I.T. is not normally associated with things that do not exist…
In related news, a kit is available for school projects and some High School kids got it to go. (The “Anthor” IIRC – open source project too). Not enough excess heat to be more than a lab curiosity, but it is very curious… The days of non-reproduction of LENR heat appear to be over.
No idea about Rossi (if he does have something, I’d wager it was entirely by accident in the process of trying to make an investment scheme… but even a blind squirrel occasionally finds a nut…)
Personally, I’d bet on fracking, horizontal drilling, and oil shales. The USA is on track to reach our highest bbl/year ever thanks to those technologies. So much for “Peak Oil” in North America… Even WITH both E and W coasts locked out, the gulf pulled for federal permits, Alaska being put off limits, and any of the Gulf of Mexico near Florida closed….
So the little carbon toy is a really neat technology… but don’t see it as anything other than a toy and a professor looking for a hand out to keep playing with it.
OTOH, if they can make an IR “solar cell”, that does have a lot of possibilities for niche uses.
Mark and two Cats says:
October 31, 2012 at 12:44 pm
I think you made a spelling mistake, I think you meant Delerium-115! Anyhow a guy down the pub told me that if I take a space ship to Alpha-Centauri/45-XRT-3A, next door to the Delusional Star System, make a sharp left then right, there’s a small rock with loads of Dylithium crystals there for the taking! Well, at least that’s what he said 😉
Galane says:
October 31, 2012 at 11:47 pm
There have never been chronic Leukemia sufferers. If you want to tell this kind of story, maybe you should invent it around Diabetes. (Yes, I think it’s an invention; until I hear the names of the large and the small company involved. It’s a little hard to google for unnamed entities.)
Give up already. Solar cells are a bright shiny object used by environuts to distract the rubes from the misery their plans will inflict on the average person.
Solar electricity will never be economical, even if the cells are free and operate at maximum quantum efficiency.
First free cells wouldn’t be free. It would still cost thousands of dollars to put them up on a roof. We put a new asphalt shingle roof on our house (a nice suburban house not Algore mansion sized) a few years ago. It cost about $15,000. I can’t conceive of a generating material that would be as cheap as asphalt roofing, which is about as generic and low tech as it gets. Furthermore the roofing business labor pool is also generic and low tech. Getting licensed electricians involved will only drive up labor costs. I have not even noodled the price of wiring and the electronics needed to make the low voltage DC output of the cells usable. Frames and land would be large costs for non-roof systems. Paving material? Around here roads are repaved every few years — more cost.
Second, solar systems do not operate at night and their output can drop between 50 and 75% on a cloudy day. Every day has a night, and a majority of days around my location are cloudy. There are no economically viable systems for storing large quantities of electricity, therefor every watt of solar you are relying on must be backed up by a watt of something else. These days that is usually natural gas generation. This doubles the capital cost of solar systems.
Third, north of the tropics there is an annual variation in the amount of available solar energy. In my location at 40 north, the ratio between available solar energy in June and the amount in December is about 2.67 to 1. The amount of electricity used does not vary nearly that much. Electricity used for air conditioning in the summer is used for lighting, heating, and cooking in December. We often hear brownout alerts on the coldest days of the winter.
The implication of this is that two thirds of a solar electricity system big enough to supply us in December would sit idle in June, producing no revenue but still carrying a capital cost.
The punch line is that solar electricity is and will remain unaffordable no matter what the solar cell technology is.
Excuse me sir; but isn’t the idea of a solar cell to absorb the solar radiant energy; most of which is in the visible spectral range.
Wouldn’t that make it hard to drive your car, with carbon solar cels painted on the windows.
If this is a science paper, rather than a chamber of commerce propaganda release, why didn’t you tell us what the absorption spectrum is and what is the air mass 1 or 1.5 solar conversion efficiency.
We know that diamond has a wide bandgap, basically too wide to be an efficient solar absorber, so just what is the band gap of this form of carbon.
Come on now; give us some scientific facts; not projections of how you are going to take over the world with soot.
“””””……Walter Sobchak says:
November 1, 2012 at 7:46 pm
Give up already. Solar cells are a bright shiny object used by environuts to distract the rubes from the misery their plans will inflict on the average person.
Solar electricity will never be economical, even if the cells are free and operate at maximum quantum efficiency. ……””””””
Solar energy is free; but collecting it is not free, in fact it is very expensive. Like Will Rogers said; “Buy land, they aren’t making any more of it.”
Who imagines that they will be allowed to put up large and valuable solar panel structures all over unimproved lands, and not have the property tax collector slap them with a property tax on the land “improvements.”Put up a building, and they will; and they will on solar arrays yoo.
You can’t even cover land with Saran Wrap or Aluminium foil cheaply enough to make it economical, so doing it with functional solar panels, will be more expensive.
Oh ! and covering the ground with Saran wrap will not survive the frequent “100 year” storms, that happen every few years.
The currently surviving solar PV companies in the USA, only survive by capitalizing their very inefficient and unsaleable solar panels, and then writing the cost off on their taxes; stiffing the other tax payers with the tab. Then they want to take over YOUR valuable solar energy space, without paying YOU any rent, and then they will sell you a minute fraction of YOUR solar energy, for less than the utility company. Why don’t they rent the solar energy space, at a rental based on the total incident solar energy; and sell THEIR electricity to the power company. That way, if they are efficient, they will get filthy rich, and you can make a nice pension from renting YOUR solar energy space.
Of course companies with higher efficiency systems, will be willing to pay a higher rent to get your space, because they can make more money, than their competitors, and you don’t have to care what their efficiency is.
You are on the right wavelength Walter.
“””””……omegaman66 says:
November 1, 2012 at 4:10 am
Solar panels only work when the sun shines but heck if I could spend a minimal amount of money and power my home when the sunshines I don’t see a down side. Hoping they can get the efficiency up to at least 5X and an produce the panels for 1/5 the cost of todays panels……””””””
Get real omegaman66. Current and still expensive real silicon solar panels achieve better than 20% solar conversion efficiency. And five times that is 100% already. And the known theoretical maximum conversion efficiency, for an impossibly expensive and as yet never demonstrated multijunction multibangap cell is around 72%. Knowledgeable workers in the field believe they can raise the present record efficiency from around 43% to about 60%. They are likely to do that; and not too far down the road.
Still doesn’t beat the maximum 1 kW per squ metre (100 Watts per square foot) solar insolation rate.
“””””…..Galane says:
October 31, 2012 at 11:47 pm
An IR photovoltaic cell capable of withstanding high temperatures would be ideal as a waste heat to energy converter. Wrap them around all the bits of power plants and HVAC systems that generate or lose heat. Fit them all over the exhaust systems of vehicles.
Get the IR efficiency high enough and eliminate the alternator. “””””
Need to learn some thermodynamics. They don’t call it WASTE HEAT for nothing. “Heat” energy is not convertible into work beyond the limits of the Carnot efficiency. There aren’t any IR radiation sensitive PV materials that can efficiently convert the Black Body thermal radiation photons of even the hottest engine materials into electricity. and none of the materials that do form pn junctions with low bandgaps (Germanium as an example) simply don’t tolerate high Temperatures. Yes their are Peltier junction s that can convert Temperature differences into electricity, at pp efficiencies. Mostly based on Bismuth and similar materials. Bismuth is about as poor an excuse for an element, as there is in the entire periodic table.
“”””””…..Philip Bradley says:
October 31, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Eyal Porat says:
October 31, 2012 at 10:18 am
I have this nagging question:
If solar panels become EXTREMELY efficient, wouldn’t it be very cold near them?
At current efficiencies, the reverse is true. Solar panels have low albedo, and I bet this carbon based material has a very low albedo, close to zero. A low albedo means they absorb most of the sun’s energy and as a result its warmer near them…..”””””
More mythology; don’t any of you people ever pick up any elementary Physics book, and actually learn something beyond dubdubdub.google.com.
EXTREMELY Efficient solar panels would convert MOST of the solar energy to ELECTRICITY, so the amount of HEAT generated would be minimal (until you use the electricity somewhere else).
So efficient solar panels would cool your house by preventing the incident solar radiant energy from being converted to waste heat right on your roof. So in cold times and climates, you would have to put in extra home heating to make up for the lost solar energy. Well unless you use all of that electricity inside your home. So you need to take your house OFF the grid, if you want to go solar efficiently. Then you don’t need to use AC inverters at 80% efficiency, and if you convert your lighting to 12 or 24 Volt DC, then you also don’t need AC-DC converters to run your lighting, so you need a half dozen car batteries to store the solar electricity, and run your LED lighting from them.
If I turn on every single LED light in my house (Only lighting I have), the total is 200 Watts. I never do that so the actual useage is never over 100 Watts, when we are even using lights.
And since some LED lights are pushing over 50% external quantum efficiency, that 100 Watts of peak electric use, only generates about 50 Watts of waste heat, so I don’t need to run air conditioning in the summer. In fact the AC system, has never ever been turned on (in Silicon valley) even to find out if it works or not.