May
27th
2021
Holy shit, that actually WORKS without magic?? · 3:02pm May 27th, 2021
Hat-tip to Latrans for this one.
You remember that, in The Maretian, Mark Watney had Starlight Glimmer put pyramid-shaped quartz glass on top of the solar cells on the Whinnybago to increase solar power collection during the drive to the Ares IV MAV.
Well... turns out, after a fashion, it works.
And it works using technology from one of the 1980s' biggest fads.
Granted, this is a lot smaller gain than what was in the story, but it's early days for this technology yet.
The question was never whether it would work, only how to do it. (Whether it's efficient to do is another question, and a nonsensical one because the battery on the end product is way more limited than the amount of power we can put into its manufacture)
I'm glad you enjoyed the article. I saw it, heck, I saw the title and cover image, and couldn't NOT share.
"Holographic solar panels" does sound like a gimmick you'd find in an early 90's "collector's edition" comic, but this is pretty darn amazing.
Now if we can find a scientific use for kanaka-knackas. (or whatever those darned things were called that always managed to hit you in the wrist once you got them going)
5525696
The 2030 or 40's version of this will be 'quantum dot' things. :-p
5525702
I like how this almost seems to be worded as a feature...
Yeah. Solar collectors are pretty much reaching the limit of what they can manage. That's why they're turning to tricks like these to boost production. A decade ago, a group managed to push solar collection to almost 45% from it's current ~20-25%. They did that with a 3D building structure instead of the typical 2D. A cross-section of the cells showed them to be vertical, curved sawtooth pattern, The sides were not flat, but ragged, like you would see on a cliff with protrusions and holes. This allowed them more surface area (a tiny improvement in power) and use three types of collector material instead of the normal blended two materials.
Solar cells work by using discrete materials that give off electrons when hit with photons. Each material (and there aren't that many that are photo-sensitive), gives off a different result, and requires a specific wavelength. Combining two currently gives you around 20%-25%, depending on the purity of the materials. Trying to add a third material in 2D merely spreads out the other two, diluting their effectiveness. This 3D structure allow you room to place all three. One layer is at the bottom, the second in the middle, the third at the top. Since each material absorbs ONLY a specific wavelength and reflects the others, all three layers are exposed to the sunlight.
It won't get much higher in efficiency because there aren't that many more materials that can provide the photovoltaic reactions at an efficiency high enough to pay for their use in the cells. (i.e., a 20-50% increase in material cost for a 2% increase in efficiency yield.)
5525979
The three layer patent always confused me, because indium tin oxide transparent metallic conductors have been used for decades, quantum interference thicknesses have been used for optical coatings for decades, Zeiss optics? And as for the tripple layer, well, they had to wait till people forgot about Kodak colur camera film so they could claim it as a their brand new idea? As for the 3D terrace idea, I know I saw it somewhere decades ago because I have a drawing of it in my school books from the early 1980s. I also have model solar panels with the top plastic sheet having little lenses all over it to increase light collection. I think that was 1970s?
Manufactuers hate holograms, because ever since CDs came out, they cost cents per square foot to make, and can be run through a newspaper printing press that can do approaching a thousand square foot per second? Id love to see a beat frequency down converter microwave stripline fresnel sheet produced in that manner.. Visible light shines on one side, a microwave beam emits from the other.
5526153
The other patents didn't deal entirely with vaporization techniques. You're kinda saying "Slapping three things on top of each other shouldn't be a patent because I've made triple-layer sandwiches"
5527808
If you combine a gas turbogenerator with a steam cycle power station, you can achieve 60% efficincy or so, supposedly 70-75% with a propane scavanger loop on the bottom end? Just depends on how hot your front end can get, Tungsten gets you to 3000K and MHD gets you to Coronal temps and direct conversion, especially given cavity magnetron wigglers are extremely well established? even just basic thermal can easily achieve thermal PV equivalents, especially when you then look at tanks of hot water for energy storage and generation, relative to costs. You want 15kWh energy for a nice hot bath? Pretty cheap insulated water storage tank, or a how expensive Tesla Power Wall?
To me, I lok at a lot of these announced ideas and think, have they announced this because they havent checked existing patents, or they look for stuff so old that they assume even prior art is no longer valid? Like Siemans looking to 150 year old Steam engine DC dynamo generators for multiple small magnets instead of one large one?
I tried running a patent for a non image forming solar thermal concentrator as a test of the process. Had to give up at the second stage when they asked for $600 equiv to continue to the next stage. Thing about the method, it was designed to take liquid water through pressed flow control channels to distributed solar concentrators to heat the liquid, then boil the water then heat the steam, so it could be used more for a scalable adaptable steam source. For some strange reason a totally different patent was needed for only changing the working fluid.
at this rate, we will discover that magic exists in the next year.