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All I want for Christmas is a 90% efficient solar panel
The idea of collecting energy from the sky – and using it in our homes to nurture, our schools to educate, our industry to build – is really the stuff of science fiction. As Arthur C Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
NovaSolix proposes a carbon nanotube based solar module which has the theoretical potential to reach 90% efficiency. The technology is based on a 1960s invention – the rectifying antenna (rectenna) – which is today used in radio frequency identification (RFID) tags. RFID tags capture the radio waves put out by scanners and power themselves. NovaSolix aims to take that ability of converting a different portion (non-visible) of the electromagnetic spectrum, and – using carbon nanotubes tuned to the sun’s full spectrum output – collect a much broader portion of the energy in our environment.
NovaSolix isn’t first to come up with this idea. Dr. Brian Willis, of the University of Connecticut, was pushing toward this technique in 2013 when he was proclaimed for a fabrication process called selective area atomic layer deposition that could allow for the manufacturing of the carbon nanotubes. At the time, commenting on solar rectennas in general, Willis was quoted as saying, "I compare it to the days when televisions relied on rabbit ear antennas for reception. Everything was a static blur until you moved the antenna around and saw the ghost of an image. Then you kept moving it around until the image was clearer. That's what we're looking for, that ghost of an image."
When asked by pv magazine how NovaSolix was growing its carbon nanotubes (still a future idea in this author’s mind), Dr. Jyotsna Iyer first let me know that carbon nanotubes aren’t a future idea anymore They’ve been grown since the 1990s in a ‘serious fashion’. Paraphrasing a thought of hers, was that science fiction had long moved to science speculation, and under her supervision in the NovaSolix labs, into science manufacturing.
The company says they’ve demonstrated a proof of concept, in front of third parties, that has touched 43% efficiency. That’d suggest a 72 cell solar module near 860 watts, with a 90% solar cell pushing 1700 watts.
[...] NovaSolix’s path to market is much like many of the new solar technologies – start in industries that need a high efficiency product and can deal with the higher price while the company scales. Satellites and drones are two regulars on this list, and more recently cars have joined it.
Sono Motors suggests its car charge up just over 18 miles on a 24% efficient solar cell. If NovaSolix can get to that 90% number, that’s 67 miles of sunlight driving. The average daily miles driven in the USA is about 40 miles per person. Elon Musk – are you reading?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @03:48AM (2 children)
Free energy. Get it to work at long IR wavelenths and you can convert radiant heat from room temperature objects to electric energy. This will cool the room. Run the electricity out of the room on wires, and then use the temperature differential to extract even more energy. I think you are fighting with Maxwell's Demon here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @09:18PM (1 child)
It does not violate the laws of thermodynamics to take thermal energy from the room and move it somewhere else. How do you think an air conditioner works? Indeed an air conditioner creates a temperature differential, and you can absolutely use that to run a heat engine. Now the second law of thermodynamics kicks in when we ask how much work we can get out of that heat engine: it will be less than the amount of work needed to run the air conditioner.
Similarly we can heat an object, and it will emit energy as a blackbody radiator. We can in principle harvest that emitted energy and use it to produce work. Once again, the second law of thermodynamics kicks in when we ask how much work we can get from this system: it will be less than the amount of work used to heat the object.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 28 2018, @10:11PM
If this diode works on IR you can take a sealed room with no temperature gradient and extract useful energy from it. You are not moving the heat with an air conditioner, you are transforming it into a lower entropy form of energy. This violates the currently accepted laws of thermodynamics.
It is Maxwell's Demon applied to photons instead of atoms.