Solar Nanotubes Make Light Work?

I have been reporting on developments in photovoltaic cells for as long as I can remember and there’s always some new technology or fabrication method that’s going to improve upon the woeful efficiency of today’s silicon based solar cells. I’m still waiting and outside the labs most commercial cells still only manage a fairly miserable 20 – 30 percent efficiency, which basically means that during their lifetime very few solar cells ever recover the enormous amount of energy put into their manufacture, let alone live long enough to generate ‘free’ electricity. I have no doubt that one day the problem will be licked and this might just be the development to do it. It’s a rolled up graphene layer nanotube and it’s the brainchild of a team of researchers at Cornell University. The first problem, though, is that it’s tiny, no larger than a DNA molecule, which means you’ll need an awful lot of them to do anything useful. The good news is that it’s very efficient and when exposed to light the tubular structure creates more electrons, and the cylindrical structure makes it easier for them to flow. I know, we’ve been here before so don’t hold your breath, but one day, it will happen, and maybe, just maybe this is where it started…

Revolutionary Plastics May See Laptops Bend

When you hear ‘plastic’ the first thing that probably comes to your mind is ‘electrical insulator’. This is perhaps because most plastics have exceptional electrical insulator properties, albeit this doesn’t necessarily mean that all plastics share the same properties. It was proven some three decades ago that certain classes of plastics may conduct electricity and could be used to create some of the most amazing electronic devices ever seen, such as flexible laptops, electronic billboards or ultra-thin displays.

Imagine an electronic device made of plastic material only. The creation of such a piece of equipment would most certainly revolutionize the electronics industry. Let’s take the humble transistor for example, the building block of every electronic device today. Although it is usually made out of silicon, a lot of semiconductor materials can be used to manufacture transistors, neither of which very flexible. However, flexibility is not the only issue with transistors. By using plastics to build transistors the manufacturing costs could also drop considerably. Read more

Sharper Fuel Cells

Sharp, in collaboration with MIT have announced an improved fuel cell technology that’s claimed to have the highest power density to date. Fuel cells have been around for yonks and basically convert chemical energy into electrical energy. It’s a sort of reverse electrolysis process (where water can be turned into hydrogen and oxygen by passing a current through it), using exotic materials that act as catalysts. In this case methanol is the fuel source. It’s a lot safer, cheaper and easier to transport than Hydrogen, which has been a popular choice with fuel cell developers in the past.

Sharp’s Direct to Methanol Fuel Cell (DMFC) prototypes are small enough to be used inside most gadgets, from mobile phones and GPS receivers to personal stereos and cameras and they say they’ll last around as long as lithium ion rechargeable batteries (3 – 5 years). Read more

Sunny Side Up, Again

One day I will check my archives but I suspect that I have been writing about the imminent arrival of low cost, flexible photovoltaic solar cells for at least the past 20 years. The idea seems simple enough. Instead of making solar cells out of expensive and fragile silicon and glass and in the process using more energy than they’ll ever generate in their useful lives develop a chemical cocktail that turns light into electricity and coat or print it onto other materials.

Well, here’s another one, and I’m no longer holding my breath, but as usual it all sounds very promising. Konarka, the company behind the technology has come up with a flexible ‘Power Plastic’ film using inkjet printing techniques. Read more

Shirt Power for iPods

A week or so ago you may recall many newspapers carried a story about an odd looking contraption that you strapped to your legs, which generated power as you walk, enough to power up to 10 mobile phones one report said. Well, here’s something a tad more elegant. Researchers at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with an idea that generates power from nano fibres, that can be incorporated into everyday items of clothing, like shirts and trousers. Pairs of fibres are coated with zinc oxide nanowires and as they rub against each other they generate tiny currents using a piezoelectric effect. Read more