Three apparently amazing developments appeared in the science news on
April 6, 2017. In reading these remember the key words “15” and “%.” That’s how
much I understand on average of the science I read. Still, these articles seem
very clear.
Double The Capacity from Solar Cells
The use of
solar energy has been held back because of the low efficiency of solar cells.
The best panels return only about a third of the sun’s energy as electricity
and most are far below that. The low efficiency means that you need a lot of
surface area to get a usable amount of electricity, and that’s not feasible in
a lot of cases.
Scientists at
Purdue University have found a way to make solar cells that are twice as
efficient as the best now on the market. They’ve done this by using materials
that allow electrons excited by photons to last longer and move farther than
allowed by current materials.
The Purdue
cells are easy and inexpensive to make, and can also be flexible, a quality
that is becoming more important as applications for solar cells rise. The only
significant barrier at the moment is that the cells contain lead. Researchers
are working hard to find a substitute. But even if they don’t, there should be
ways to seal the cells in a way that prevents them from becoming toxic. Either
way, if this technology hits the market soon, energy use will change
dramatically. Coal will no longer be cost effective at all and energy
production will become highly decentralized.
Super-Cheap Nano Printing
Many groups
in industry and academe have spent years trying to make the printing of
electronic circuits cheap enough that it could be used on just about everything
– like regular printing.
Researchers
at Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland) appear to have solved the problem, using a
technique that allows printing of highly efficient and stable nanoscale materials.
Their printed objects can include not just passive information but also
circuits that are capable of active computation.
It’s difficult
to know the changes that will occur when the cost of printing an electronic
circuit is so low at to not affect the price of the product it’s on. One
obvious use, and the one that has long attracted the attention of industry, is
inventory management. With printed electronics, every object would be able to
carry a lot of information. The article here uses the example of a milk carton
that can warn a buyer when it’s approaching its use by date (this assumes a “smart”
refrigerator, and those are definitely on the way). But there are many more
possibilities, most of which will likely be developed after the technology is
available.
Vast Increase in Efficiency of
Lithium Ion Batteries
Batteries
are the big barrier to the green energy revolution. Used in cars, they don’t
store enough to give the range people want and take too long to charge. And,
they’re too expensive to provide the backup needed to overcome the inconsistent
nature of solar and wind energy – you need to store some of the electricity so
it will be available when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.
Researchers
at the University of Cambridge (UK), Wuhan University of Technology in China
and the University of Namur in Belgium, were curious to see whether Murray’s
Law could help with batteries and some other problems in chemistry. Murray’s
Law describes how a leaf keeps building new veins to optimize the process of
photosynthesis. Transferring this biological process to chemistry appears to have
been very fruitful. Scientists know that more surface area stores more
electrons, but the Murray’s Law analysis shows that the pore size is critically
important as well – getting the pore size just right is what leaves do. Researchers
report increased capacity and up to 25x faster charging by
optimizing pore size in the most common battery storage material. They describe
the manufacturing process as easy and inexpensive.
https://phys.org/news/2017-04-leaf-vein-key-battery-life.html and https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/leaf-vein-structure-could-hold-key-to-extending-battery-life
