Pizza Oven + Inkjet Printer + Nail Polish = Solar Cell?!
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 08.22.08
Solar Power for Developing Countries
Nicole Kuepper, a 23 years old PhD student and lecturer in the school of photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering at the University of NSW, might have just found a way to make the world a better place. Her patented technology isn't quite as simple as the title of this post would lead you to believe, but it should nonetheless reduce the cost and technical requirements of making solar cells.
Electricity for the World's Poorest 2 Billion People
The processes she developed for the iJET solar cell don't require the very expensive clean rooms and high-temperature ovens of traditional solar panel manufacturing plants, but rather pizza ovens, nail polish and inkjet printers, making them accessible to developing countries.
Australian Museum Eureka Prizes
Ms Kuepper's solar breakthrough won two Australian Museum Eureka Prizes, the most prestigious scientific prize in Australia. "The 23-year-old took out the people's choice award as well as the prize for young leader in environmental science and climate change."
While it could take five years to commercialise the patented technology, providing renewable energy to homes in some of the least developed countries would enable people to "read at night, keep informed about the world through radio and television and refrigerate life-saving vaccines". And it would also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Ms Kuepper said that the solar cells should be of high enough quality to be used anywhere in the world, including Australia.
Thanks to Michael W. for the tip.
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Girl power!!
sounds a lot like nanosolar's approach to things, but smaller scale.
@vboring
her approach costs less and can be implemented on a smaller scale without the high tech hurdles of other production lines
Sure...a pizza oven, some acetone (ie, nail polish remover) an inkjet...and oh yeah, some exotic electronic polymer or nanoparticles. Seems the authors of these articles forgot the most important part.
Lots of people are working on printed solar cells. They suffer from two huge flaws: crappy efficiency and short life-times. Making them in a "pizza-oven" will only make both issues worse.
@Chad,
Potentially "crappy" efficiency for low-cost locally built solar cells instead of no electricity seems like a decent trade-off, especially in certain circumstances -- like developing nations with lots of sunlight, but lacking resources for large scale infrastructure projects.
If this girl is as cute with her goggles off as she is with them on, and such a great smile... every fashion magazine on Earth is going to want to feature her in their pages... which is awesome, we need a boat load of eco-heroines! Spire Solar is a global solar company providing turnkey solar factories and capital equipment to manufacture photovoltaic modules and cells worldwide.
I am also researching printed solar cells. I was a little disappointed to see that there is no mention of the material or the type she is using.
It's no secret that dye-sensitized solar cells can be fabricated with very crude lab conditions.
But.. good for her! It's something all of us have to contribute to.
I love it. Once again the Macgyver solution will save the day.
Those solar cells coming out of the oven look delicious.
@ Chad
what a hater...
Geez, its not like one little lowly Ph. D student has accomplish something big energy and big tech has not. While there is certainly a niche for places in the world that do not have energy grid infrastructure, these "innovative" companies, are using the oldest energy source know to man, and these "hi-tech" industries have been shuffling their feet, while sucking at the tit of the consumer/taxpayer.
so lets just stop innovation all together and sit our thumbs and wait for big business to come up with a solution. How much more time do they need? Eons?
The girl has accomplished something and has been rightly recognized. Meanwhile, what have you done with your life chad?
Seems like a good idea, but....and I dont mean to shot down the technology or this article...but there does seem like some important information missing.
little baker, big pizza.
Girls rock. I really wish more women would go into the sciences. Hats off to her.
Solar,Wind,Nuclear take too long to implement and are more expensive than ethanol. We need solutions now not in 20 years!
1. In 6months you can have 1000 gals of ethanol from 1 acre planted in Industrial Hemp or cattails.
2. 5% of unusable farmland would meet our transport needs. 50% and we're Saudia Arabia.
3 The infrastructure is here .
4. Any car can run on ethanol with a $300 part
5. Ethanol can be made for $1 wholesale.
More http://peswiki.com/index.php/Review:Alcohol_can_be_a_Gas
Youtube alcohol can be a gas part1
@Kenneth & 800HighTech
University of NSW SPREE staff page for Nicole Kuepper
It has a contact email as well as two Selected Publications
Feel free to find the publications, or ask her for them -- I spent five minutes ( maybe a little less ) finding Ms Kuepper's staff page. :D
Great to make improvements in all elements of alternative energy research but a biomass gasifier could do more than an adequate job. American cities used to be lit with gas through gasifiers. During WWII, people were driving gasifier cars (especially in Europe). Energy solutions exist, we just stopped using some of them because of our addiction to cheap foreign oil. A good place to brainstorm or learn about gasification is on the free alternative energy and gasification social network www.VictoryGasworks.com.
Great videos and information. Those of you who are handy could learn to build a gasifier in one weekend with recycled parts. Hey, this could power third world countries...wait it already is in parts of India. Almost no one knows of this technology. There is a cool greenie that has a video showing people how to build a gasifier and has a workshop for building them coming up on Sept. 6th. His info can be found at the gasifier social network.
We don't always have to reinvent the wheel to find the right solution.
So, how does it work? i wanna know!
thank goodness, there may be hope for us after all.
what an impressive idea! now lets just hope the bush administration doesnt try to throw a monkey wrench into this too
Photovoltaics are undergoing major transformations as of late. The best you can expect to get out of them, currently, is about 25% effective photon absorption. While I am not certain of this, I would imagine that a cheaper manufacturing process will yield even lower results. It would make sense to increase thier photon capturing abilty and pay a bit more for the quality as it would cost you less in the long run. And that is what a government looks for, long term fixes, not short (responsible government anyway). Besides, photovoltaic is getting far too much press with all of it's energy insufficiencies. Wind power is FAR more cost effective and energy producing. Every American home could power thier homes completely 'off-grid'; for around 10,000 US, including turbine, and battery storage. If you don't live in a windy area, local PUD's should lease land in windier areas and have the power pumped in. We need to section off parts of the midwest (which are some of our windiest areas) that currently produce oil and NG, for wind turbine land. It is amazing to me the difference in press wind gets to solar. Wind is FAR superior. And, guess what, unlike solar it typically works BETTER on cloudy days!!!!
good for her although a good idea
@Josh B
Josh your kinda missing the point, its not about how much efficiency or in-efficiency that this process will attenuate its more about the fact that this is like a "1 time upgrade" .
And i would also imagine that efficiency will become greater as time goes by and/because that the process will be refined . !
Smaller developing countrys and average joe's alike won't have to go out now and spend millions on infrastructure and equipment .
Not to mention that this process pulls double duty.
Have a nice slice of PV and ...would you like a pizza with that ? ;)
You must also take into account that it TAKES reasources to infact build said infrastructures .
This little girl may have just bridged the gap between wind power effeciency/cost/performance and PV (Solar Pholtaic Power)
My hats off to her.
Regards,
~
Fascinating! I want several!
The bottom line is the cost per watt. Efficiency does not matter as much if you can reduce the cost per watt. The '4 minute mile' is $1 per watt.
By the way, the best value solar today is solar hot water. I have seen some nice 'batch' solar designs on the net you can make yourself.
It is very much intersting and looks easy to devlope. I will try it.
I wouldn't hold your breath people, UNSW PV department has been promising $1 per watt solar panels for over 20 years, the solar industry here has heard it all a dozen times, whenever the uni wants more funding in fact. This dept has copped a lot of flack about their hollow promises from the industry, all they've managed to achieve so far are some insanely expensive cells and to damage the industry by making the public think that $1 per watt cells are just around the corner.
Pizza ovens and cooking in them by getting power from the sun, or wood fired designs, is the modern way to go. In any culture and society.
I'm sorry to say I've seen no information that she has done anything other than develop a new technique of connecting wires to the existing parts of a solar cell - and we already have ways to do that. Nothing she talks about involves making a solar cell from scratch. If this is wrong then I blame the article for lack of information and unnecessary spin.
It sounds like it is only a new technique of connecting wires to the existing solar cell. If so, it is nothing to be excited about and it can not be of any use to me or a 3rd world person who wants to make a cheap solar cell.
If someone would actually work out a way to "cook" a solar cell from scratch in a homemade 1000 C oven, with mechanical pumped vacuum and simple diffusion of elements into the crystal blanks, then I'd be excited that it might work. THEN you could use her technique to hook up the wires to the cell with an inkjet printer instead of a plasma metal depositor. It would still be a huge effort to work out all the cell construction details before you even considered using her idea. And I still don't know where to get the raw silicon wafers.
John