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So long, silicon: Researchers create solar panels from cheap copper oxide
- msds 14y agoThis article is really very wrong about conventional solar cell manufacture - especially the "Almost every solar panel..." paragraph. Here's a decent resource on standard manufacturing technology: http://pveducation.org/pvcdrom http://pveducation.org/pvcdrom
- debacle 14y agoDisclaimer: I am not a physicist, and most of this is from memory relating to DIY experiments ~2 years ago. * Copper oxide panels are not new. * They are much less efficient than silicon panels. * Cu2O is much more expensive than silicon.
- ktizo 14y agoMy guess is that the copper oxide would be much cheaper to work into much thinner sheets than silicon, which is also expensive to purify, so although the raw material may be more expensive, the processing costs and volume used might be where the savings are made. Also, the abstract on the referenced paper seems to indicate that the efficiency of this design is reasonable. I didn't go beyond the paywall to find out more though. Photovoltaics (PV) are a promising source of clean renewable energy, but current technologies face a cost-to-efficiency trade-off that has slowed widespread implementation.(1, 2) We have developed a PV architecture—screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics (SFPV)—that in principle enables fabrication of low-cost, high efficiency PV from virtually any semiconductor, including the promising but hard-to-dope metal oxides, sulfides, and phosphides.(3) Prototype SFPV devices have been constructed and are found to operate successfully in accord with model predictions. http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl3020022 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/nl3020022
- ori_b 14y agoYou can deposit thin films of silicon on to, say, ordinary glass. Usually, this is done with CVD, although I think epitaxial growth is also a popular technique. The problem is that this tends to produce amorphous silicon, which is not especially efficient. There is a good deal of work to get to the point where monocrystalline silicon thin film cells are viable outside of the lab, though.
- Joakal 14y agoActually, there's a way to make thinner silicon sheets; A particle accelerator bombards these wafers with hydrogen ions: http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122231-solar-panels-made-with-ion-cannon-are-cheap-enough-to-challenge-fossil-fuels http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/122231-solar-panels-made-...
- caladan 14y agoThat's what I thought as well. Silicon is basically.... well, sand, isn't it?
- kragen 14y agoIn the same way that aluminum and iron are basically sand, yes.
- Tuna-Fish 14y agoGoing from sand to pure polysilicon is extremely energy-intensive and expensive.
- debacle 14y agoCu2o is still about 2-3x as expensive, though.
- mchannon 14y agoSilicon wafers (cheap ones) cost about $150/kg. Polysilicon (good luck making a wafer out of it) costs about $30/kg (market has crashed). Copper costs about $7.50/kg.
- Daniel_Newby 14y agoIt's not terribly energy intensive. You want to see energy intensive, pick up a beer can. Aluminum is electricity in solid form. Silicon is capital equipment intensive. It is processed in batches. While each batch is being processed, it ties up an expensive processing station for a long time.
- mchannon 14y ago1 pound of metallurgical grade silicon takes about 1 pound of coal and 1 pound of wood chips. 1 pound of polysilicon takes about 2 pounds of metallurgical grade and even more energy. 1 pound of wafer takes about 2 pounds of polysilicon and even more energy. Aluminum probably doesn't take as much energy but the difference is Silicon's energy is cheap (coal and wood chips for the first step).
- ErikHuisman 14y agoYes, silicon panels are not the only solution. Although not as efficient as silicon other techniques have other qualities that make it commercially viable (price, scaling, maintainability) as explained in this video by nano solar http://www.nanosolar.com/nanosolar-technology-overview http://www.nanosolar.com/nanosolar-technology-overview
- geogra4 14y agoHow about we mine mars to make solar panels from Iron Oxide? Or bring machines to mars that will build solar panels? Then we could have an entire electrical power source for human habitation or machine experiments.
- btipling 14y agoGetting to the point where the amount of energy it will require to get the panels out of Mars' gravity will be less than the energy delivered will take a long time. And what are you going to do when something breaks down?
- hexagonal 14y agoYou're 32 years late on that idea: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/ http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/
- archgoon 14y agoAs it stands, we have not yet built a factory using exclusively robots. I'm sure that this would have very useful applications on Earth, as well as on Mars, if you were interested in tackling it :).
- Joakal 14y agoIf you want to start somewhere: http://phys.org/news/2010-12-sahara-aims-power-world.html http://phys.org/news/2010-12-sahara-aims-power-world.html
- Shivetya 14y agoI found the picture humorous, reminded me of so many post holocaust games, unfortunately it also reminded me of some cities I passed through that border the Ohio river.
- JumpCrisscross 14y agoPost-apocalypse, not post-Holocaust
- Stefan_H 14y agoPost-holocaust is perfectly correct. The event of nuclear war is often refereed to as a nuclear holocaust. Note the lack of capitalization on the 'h' making it not signify the proper name for the event, the Holocaust. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_holocaust
- zellyn 14y ago"a great or complete devastation or destruction, especially by fire" - sgtm
- Stefan_H 14y agoI'm glad I'm not the only one who has to do something when someone corrects a person, but is wrong themselves. One of my BIGGEST pet peeves!
- andrewflnr 14y agoI would still bet the OP actually meant apocalypse, even if their mistake turned out sorta correct. "Post-holocaust" is a rare usage.
- forgotAgain 14y agoSource article (not so breathless and a more reasonable title): http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/discovery-opens-door-to-cheaper-solar-panels/ http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/discovery-opens-door-...
- andrewflnr 14y agoAnd no OnSwipe, either, thanks.
- alecdibble 14y agoThe takeaway from this article is that they came up for a technique to use cheaper materials instead of silicon. This is significant because silicon is very expensive and every increasing demand is also increasing the prices of it at a very fast rate. I took a class on CMOS Digital Design where the professor went over manufacturing overhead for a processor. The cost of the silicon alone was astounding, not even taking into account all the other overhead that comes with the process. Unfortunately, like a lot of other research in this field, its real world applicability may be relatively limited. One of the reasons for this is that so much time, money, and infrastructure has been put into modern silicon semiconductor manufacturing that no one really wants to touch anything else. It could mean starting from scratch and requiring massive amounts of R&D and process planning to break even. The real breakthroughs come when someone keeps the existing silicon process in mind and makes discoveries that use the existing infrastructure. That's the kind of research that really "changes" things. If someone could come up with a manufacturing system that was cheap and easy to swap out or modify the process, they could literally change technology as we know it. If you could have the capability to scale processes easily, a lot of the really cool and cutting-edge research could get implemented on a large scale. EDIT: I graduated as an electrical engineer and have taken several clean room processing classes, in case you were wondering.
- revelation 14y agoFrom what I've learned, silicon is abundant in the earth crust. The problem is that you need a very very high purity to make useful wafers. So technically, its not a problem of scarcity, just a lack of miners producing it in a very pure form, which could be solved by having more of them. Are there some other difficulties that I'm overlooking?
- alecdibble 14y agoIt's expensive to manufacture silicon at semiconductor quality, even when talking about polycrystalline wafers. (Monocrystalline wafers, used for "chips", is even more expensive and prone to defect." People are increasing production of polycrystalline silicon wafers but the demand is much greater than the supply, even with this increase. The cycle basically goes like this: polycrystalline gets more expensive because of demand -> supply increases -> prices go down (in theory) -> demand increases -> polycrystalline gets expensive again. This is an endless loop right now, as the total amount of possible demand is >> than the growth of polycrystalline foundries. Furthermore, LCD displays also use this form of polycrystalline silicon, which doesn't help with the demand problem. Decently-graded silicon is inherently expensive to manufacture because of the process involved. The takeaway is that if these metal-oxides are cheaper to produce, even if they are more expensive for the raw material, the cost savings would carry over to the products. Equally relevant when talking about solar cells is how much energy is needed to produce the cells themselves. Right now, an enormous amount of energy is required for silicon solar cells. Helping the energy crisis doesn't help if something takes that much energy to produce. (I do not know the ratio of lifetime energy output versus energy to manufacture but I am sure it's not very good.)