12 Year Old Boy Invents New Type of Solar Cell
Now here’s a story that makes me feel profoundly unaccomplished: a 12 year old boy in Beaverton, Oregon recently developed a new type of 3D solar cell that makes other solar cells look inefficient by comparison.
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William Yuan’s 3D cell can absorb both visible and UV light. According to his calculations, solar panels equipped with his 3D cells could provide 500 times more light absorption than current commercial solar cells and nine times more light than existing 3D solar cells.
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Yuan received a well-deserved $25,000 scholarship for his research. The next step? Getting his invention to market. Of course, the viability of his solar cells will ultimately depend on their cost efficiency—but Yuan has his whole life ahead of him to work on that.
You can check out the original press release here.
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inventing is one thing, putting it into practical use or market is another. We’ve seen alot of this kind of invention go down the drain. perhaps big corporation can pick up the idea and go from there.
As commercial solar cells are pushing into the 30%+ efficiency range, with cutting edge technologies now in the low 40%s, any calculations claiming 500x improvement are wildly distorted at best and flat-out wrong at worst.
Woah that’s a very amazing feat for someone at that age.
Wasn’t there something like this in the book Ecotopia Emerging? Only it was a girl in the book
Pics or it didn’t happen.
that’s freaking amazing, now if we just make a farm out of those and put one on top of every car……
Yuan reminds me of Philo Farnsworth, who invented electronic television and demonstrated it in 1928.
Apparently, the young Philo was watching the sun come up, when the idea came to him, and he rushed to school to tell his teacher. The sun was lighting up his family potato field row-by-row, just like the electron gun does inside the Cathode Ray Tube (CRT).
Efficient batteries are exactly what our new technology requires - see the Tesla all-electric roadster, for example. It uses lithium batteries.
Hmmmm…
Current solar cells have an efficiencies between 5 and 25%. 500 times 5% gives an efficiency of 250%, which means that the cell wil generate 250 watts out of every 100 watts coming in.
Hope the cells are better than his calculations…
“500 times more light absorption than current commercial solar cells” So to keep the efficiency under 100%, the current cells should have an efficiency lower than 100% / 500 = 0.2% ??? Hmmm!!!!
10 to 1 the kid is home schooled.