http://blog.wired.com/geekdad/2008/09/12-year-old-rev.html?n...
I mean, I'm sure the kid is smart and all (and no doubt has had some help from his parents) but the media-hype to technical-details ratio here is off the charts.
“We have demonstrated that we can extract electrons using this approach,” Ready said. “Now we need to get a good baseline to see where we compare to existing materials, how to optimize this and what’s needed to advance this technology.”
So he's getting what, upwards of 3500% efficiency? Even accounting for the extra energy of using ultraviolet wavelengths, this sounds a lot like bad math.
Now if he boosted the efficiency to say, three times what we get now? That'd be amazing all on its own.
At the moment I've got no idea what he _actually_ did. Obviously, parts of this story are complete BS (e.g. 500 times). Is there something genuinely worthwhile? I haven't read a sufficiently detailed article to figure it out.
Although it is rather low on facts and high on hype.
From the article: Most solar cells in use today are either photovoltaic, meaning they harness only visible light, or thermal.
Also: they're engineered to stand freely in three dimensions
So you have panels that catch both visible and UV light, and can do it in three dimensions.
If he is right, solar panels with his 3D cells would provide 500 times more light absorption than commercially-available solar cells and nine times more than cutting-edge 3D solar cells.
So apparently there is some advantage to 3D cells, apparently related to multiple light interactions:
"Regular solar cells are only 2D and only allow light interaction once," he said.
It's still not apparent what the basis is for the 500x light absorption figure. Seems to me that the most meaningful basis is the footprint of the device, but that is not clear from any story I've read on this subject.
Maybe it is a mis-paraphrase of 500-suns concentration capacity. Alternately, it might only refer to UV.
Maybe they are 500x more efficient in the UV, but in that case it's a meaningless number because the Sun emits very little energy in the UV.
Hmmm. I'm pretty sure that's not the definition that I learned.
