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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How can it provide 500 times more light absorption? That would imply that current solar cells absorb less than 0.2%, which is clearly not the case.
thats crazy! i like this blog site and am going to bookmark it.
awesome!
Awesome, i just bookmarked this site
“Now here’s a story that makes me feel profoundly unaccomplished”
Tell me about it. Even worse for me as I grew up there
Awwwwe…the rare child prodigy.
Wow, now that is one smart kid. Lucky parents. My kid is as dumb as a box of rocks and only cares about socializing. Must be nice.
Jiff
http://www.anonymize.us.tc
Now wait a minute. According to Wikipedia, even the least efficient amorphous silicon-based solar cells have a convertion efficiency of 6%. At x500 efficiency, apparently his magnificent new cells put out 2900% more energy than the incoming light contains. Also, the sentence ‘…and nine times more light than existing 3D solar cells’ seems to imply that the cells are emissive, which is clearly not the case.
Nevertheless, it’s a commendable effort for which the young Mr. Yuan deserves all possible praise.
Photovoltaic arrays are more than ‘nano towers’ or 3D cells and a “concept” is different from a “proof”.
Practical application, has yet to determine if this “could provide 500 times more light absorption”, it sounds wonderful but remains just a “concept”.
William is gifted. Partly due to Men of 8-18 years, being able to utilise their minds ability, being free from adult conditioning and associated life traumas.
Personally at age 11, my ability to understand bases and positional numeral systems, provided foundation for learning assembly programming (Intel 8080 Chip set with MS-DOS v1.1), mainly so I could reverse engineer games and have better high scores
William has an impressive CV for anyone, being age 12 or 30, yet it is outside of “concepts”, which will determine his destiny.
Being another factory line software developer or contributing scientific achievements which benefit all mankind, are not so radical or different from the efficiency speculations expressed here.
12 year old boy invents new type of solar cell | nerdd.net…
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