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Caffeine Cranks Up Solar Cells
- Cheyana 8y agoAn old article, but apparently wine also helps them... https://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Take-Sunlight-Add-Red-Wine-Get-More-Power-_21954 https://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Take-Sunlig... Also superconductors... https://phys.org/news/2011-05-red-wine-clue-superconductive-future.html https://phys.org/news/2011-05-red-wine-clue-superconductive-...
- lawlessone 8y ago>apparently wine also helps them Just imaging what Buckfast would do!
- jacobush 8y agoAnd photographic wine can be developed in coffee as well as wine... related?
- redsummer 8y agoViagra?
- russfink 8y agoJust how was this discovered? "Hey, no food or drink in the lab. DARN IT - look what you did now!"
- michelb 8y agoI'm wondering if somewhere someone has a program running a simulation on combinations of chemicals to see what would happen.
- lm28469 8y agoThat's how we ended up with microwave ovens. > In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery
- dna113 8y agoLol what else was melting if the chocolate in his pocket was melting?
- gdubs 8y agoThis is only barely related but when we bought our house the (ancient) gas stove was malfunctioning. I looked up the brand (Modern Maid, I think) and was very surprised to learn they were a subsidiary of Raytheon. The thought of a gas appliance made by a weapons manufacturer was, a little unsettling. Replaced that thing pretty quickly.
- MS90 8y agoDon't go looking too deep into ol' General Electric then.
- sl1ck731 8y agoI don't understand this. Were you afraid your stove was a weapon in disguise?
- gdubs 8y agoNo, it was a joke. I only know Raytheon as a weapons / explosives company. Had no idea they had a consumer products arm at some point (unlike GE which at one point owned everything including film studios, which is fairly common knowledge.) Given that we were concerned we had a leaky gas appliance...
- RenRav 8y agoSo an immediate increase in the efficiency and significantly improved longevity over time... doesn't this basically multiply the panels effectiveness as time goes on? That's incredible this gain could come from caffeine
- edh649 8y agoI think improved longevity over time is relative to non-caffeinated solar cells, caffeinated solar cells last longer (they don't improve over time)
- Bartweiss 8y agoIt looks like about a 13x longevity improvement over the tested timespan, which is absolutely nuts. It's specific to perovskite solar cells, though, which aren't in commercial use because their lifespans are so short. They're one of the 'holy grail' high-efficiency technologies like magnesium batteries, so a 13x increase in lifespan is at once hugely important and not enough to make them realistic.
- finnh 8y agoTFA doesn't show die-off, though. The graph just shows "after 1300 hours at 85C, still producing at 86% output". The slope doesn't imply a drop right after (but of course who knows).
- Bartweiss 8y agoGood point, thanks. My assumption was that since the slope looks fairly flat, this was still a nonstarter for most applications - 86% after 2 months is good progress, but commercial standards are 80% after 20 years. Even so, it's a big step up from the material's past of failing outright after short spans.
- mises 8y agoThis looks cool, but I am afraid it could drive up coffee prices. That would be very sad.
- RandomInteger4 8y agoAccording to wikipedia, caffeine can be synthesized, but is normally just obtained as a byproduct of decaffeination. If anything would increase in price, it would be energy drinks and other caffeinated beverages. Price increase would probably be minuscule, as I imagine the demand for solar panels is dwarfed by the demand for soda and energy drinks,.
- vasili111 8y agoI think it will drive down the price of synthetic caffeine.
- mises 8y agoMaybe, but that is only because synthetic caffeine is currently not very competitive with the free caffeine produced as a by-product of decaf manufacture. The price of existing naturally-derived caffeine (and possibly the coffee from which it is derived) could rise, which is not a pleasant thought.
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- yeuxverte 8y agoThe article compares caffeine vs. no-caffeine but I'd be interested to see how caffeine compares to other additives. For all we know H2O could do the same thing
- djrogers 8y agoFTA: > UCLA professor Yang Yang’s lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang's graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix. They tested different compounds for years before finding one that works - I don' think it would add much to the article to list every one of them.
- Bartweiss 8y agoThe big element missing from the headline: this isn't about improving existing commercial solar cells. The caffeine improvement is specific to perovskite-based solar cells, rather than commercial-use silicon. Perovskite is expected to reach higher efficiencies than silicon at far lower production costs, but isn't viable because of rapid degradation and problems producing panels at scale. The good news, though, is that caffeine's improvements work on exactly those problems, raising defect-free crystal size and increasing panel longevity while in use. And it's an absolutely massive increase: the lifespan gain is more than an order of magnitude.