Scientists develop mega-thin solar cells that could be shockingly easy to produce: ‘As rapid as printing a newspaper’::These cells could be laminated onto various kinds of surfaces, such as the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea.
If it’s shockingly easy to produce then just do it and then you can write a declarative headline that doesn’t need to use the word “could”. If you can’t then I’m guessing it’s not that shockingly easy.
To echo the other individual who replied, it’s shockingly easy to make injection molded parts, but there is usually a long process before you bring the final product to market. And that’s with all the manufacturing processes already existing at scale.
In this case, the processes need to be fleshed out from scratch, which adds even more time to the ramp up. So even if the headline is 100% accurate, and there are no other roadblocks, it would still take a significant chunk of time to bring to market.
Yeah, how dare they report on science and technology - I’ve barely seen a dozen articles about Will Smith’s personal life today, we don’t have resources to waste talking about successful research projects from MIT!
When MIT get in a salacious romance scandal then they can have a bit of our precious media space but get the fuck out of here with your science bullshit nerds.
For a while I was celebrating when I didn’t see Taylor Swift’s name in either the sports or entertainment heading on google news. And each heading only showed three headlines.
This isn’t science, this is engineering, and it’s crappy engineering at that.
Man, y’all a bunch a grumpies.
This technology doesn’t hinge on what we here believe or predict. It will happen or it won’t.
We could speculate on how cool it would be, and how it could be used if it happens, instead of pooh-poohing it.
I would imagine it could only be useful for 30 minutes before the cell would be unusable. Arent solar cells just P-N junctions where if it is really thin it would just run out of holes to fill?
Edit: why am I being downvoted? To my limited understanding from my electrochemistry courses from 10 years ago, photovoltaics depend on the density. Theres only a limited amount of free electrons and only a limited number of free holes. The thinner the material the less likely an electron hole can get filled with whatever N-doped semiconductor used.
By your logic all solar panels would run out of these holes after a certain period of use?
Yes, correct me if I am wrong buy is that not the case?
No, definitely not. There’s no such lifetime limit.
Why not? I have not looked at this in forever so im probably wrong but I thought that these pn pairs end up creating some band gap. Over time that band gap widens until the energy from the sunlight just isnt strong enough to move through the system. In the end, it has a finite qty of holes so that limit depends on the qty of doped materials.
Again i dont remember well so 🤷
You’re a bit jumbled up here.
There are P N junctions where the magic happens. The P side conducts by moving vacant electron “slots” through the structure, we call these holes as in electron holes. There isn’t a lack of electrons or anything, both N and P are charge neutral, instead: Where in a metal if you push an electron into it in a circuit it bumps another one over a bit and so on in a P type you pull an electron off one end, the “hole” moves taking an electron from deeper in to fill where it was until at the end it pulls another in.
As you can see the number of holes is constant under normal circumstances. We pay attention to them for reasons that’ll become clear.
Now since N types want to volunteer electrons and P types have little electron holes ready, and these are negatively and positively charged (remember overall the material is neutral though) if we put them together then in a very narrow region some holes will accept electrons and fill up. As this happens ion cores (nuclei of the atoms making up the material missing an electron) are exposed in the N type making a small positive region, while the extra electrons in the P type make a small negative region. This balances the hole-electron attraction exactly and we have a stable charge depleted region.
Following? let’s talk about lightning for a moment.
you know how everything becomes a conductor if you try hard enough? think lightning jumping down through air, a tree, and some literal earth. Well lighting ionises (pulls electrons off making a kind of gas made of charged particles) stuff mostly but there’s a special sort of state most metals and similar can get to (indeed most metals are in this state at room temperature) where they’re sort of lightly ionised. Instead of the electron going away it sort of becomes promiscuous and is happy to share its time with nearby atoms.
Electrons in this state have certain energy levels associated with them, we call this band of states the conduction band. To get to that energy state you need to go from the valence band across a "band gap " to be promoted to slutty electron.
OK so these bound hole-electron pairs moved from the conduction band to the valence band when they settled down with each other. They can’t conduct anymore. But if a photon hits them just right they trial an open marriage and separate into the conduction band. The electron is now more attracted to the positively charged region back from whence it came and visa versa for the hole. Once they get bumped over they have to go the long way round the circuit to find each other again and that’s how we get energy.
Thank you for the eli5 refresher on how PN junctions and band gap works.
All I was saying was if there is some N-type material with only some finite number of excess electrons and some P-type with finite number of holes, there is a specific energy level that this semiconductor requires for valence band conduction. The electrons are not being replaced in the circuit so the N-type is slowly degrading. In a normal scenario, these materials would take forever to deplete and so it is usually treated like an infinite well. In reality, a cell will have only a finite potential energy and a discrete so in effect widens the band gap until the cell is no longer functional.
On the contrary, i know thin film solar cells exist. Way back in college i remember making organic dye sensitized solar cells and they were complete garbage. I might be associating all thin cells the same way but yeah. Was a bit of time ago for me and im going off my shitty memory
The electrons are being replaced, otherwise the system would become charged over time. They go the long way round the P side of the junction and bond with a hole again in the depleted region.
Solar cells do deteriorate over time but it’s not due to use, or not directly. The structure of various parts gets damaged through lattice migration due to heat/thermal cycling, UV radiation and higher can cause excitation to reactive states that damage crap, dopants can migrate around over time (like how carbon can leech from steel) and reduce the conductive efficiency etc.
I think this might be what you’re confused by? there are a finite number of available charge carriers in the depletion region and damage to the region uses them up, but it’s not because they’re used up it’s because of structural and chemical changes caused by damage that occurs due to the environment.
I too have a bridge to sell you!
I love when people act like progress never happens, we’re in a world where developments happen so fast it’s impossible to keep up with a single field of development because so much new stuff is happening but sure anyone interested in the emergence of printable pv is a rube…
I see the same in ai discussion, I use it when coding all the time but every article about a new development has someone saying it’s useless and a gimmick.
Rapid deployment solar is happening whether you like it or not, the science has been building for a couple of decades and every interesting new study and development opens up new avenues of possibility. This will be a game changer in many situations and it’s something we can see getting closer, studies like this are so interesting because we can see which avenues things are likely to take and consider how it would affect things.
We have a tendency to think of science as someone waking up and inventing something and then it’s ready to hit the shelves but it’s never worked like that. If you’d been reading the news when photography was new you’d see endless news stories about progress towards colour photography, about potential methods and means of a making a single plate colour image - famously you’d have also seen discussions in the letters section of the Times between some of the chemists that’d go on to actually solve it.
Progress happens, science happens - sure you don’t care that they found a way of transferring printed solar onto fabric which avoids the need for the fabric to be able to endure the entire fabrication process but it’s actually a pretty cool thing. The article is kinda dumb I really don’t think this process will hold up to the intense sea air and mechanical stress of being a sail but for simpler uses such as an awning cover over carparks or even better train lines its likely to be very useful - imagine being able to generate the power for electric vehicle charging or train travel simply from a fabric roof which also shades the area from hot sun.
A process that makes the current chemistry cheap and fast to print onto a useful material is a big thing, not as huge as extending the working life of the materials but by being easier to make and replace we might find that there are a lot of uses for rapid temporary deployment of PV in situations like disaster zones but also in seasonal infrastructure which is especially important for things like music festivals, holiday locations (which see power usage vastly increased when tourists are in town), and travel routes.
Yeah, you’re missing the point that this is a shouting headline that I’ve read about 50 times in the past ten years at least. Progress happens, I’m sure, I neo t say it doesn’t. This, however, is sensationalist bullshit, not progress.
I think you probably don’t understand the article because you only read the headline, the actual study is very interesting and solves a problem that was often talked about before. Those of us with an interest in this field recognise the advancement that’s been made are are interested in the implications,
The headline is like if every article about CERN, James Webb, and any other physics study was titled ‘could lead to unified field theory’ or if every time anyone releases a new machine learning model the headlines were all about AGI - Oh yeah, they do that one too…
So yes it’s a bad headline but it’s great science and we really are making great progress with printable PV - there will come a time where you start seeing it everywhere.
Much like AI people have known that the relevant breakthroughs have been coming for a long time but it’s not until a certain threshold is met that we see companies scrambling to stake their claim. Someone will make a factory producing one of the various printable PV methods and market it to a suitable situation, people will find other uses for it also besides the initial market and as demand becomes established others will leap on and start making their own variation.
