By: Amruth Uppaluri, 9th Grade
Living in Arizona means lots of sunshine and many options to harness solar energy. When construction started for a solar plant near our house we were all very excited to learn about solar panel manufacturing - as the building size was pretty big. With the bad economy, the biggest question we have is “Can this company survive competition from international solar companies?” For this company to survive, it would need low cost solar technology with more efficiency and easier manufacturing.
When scientist Zhong Wang at Georgia tech announced his invention of optical fibers in solar cell use, it raised many hopes for improving solar technology’s efficiency and cost. He suggested using fiber optic cables with zinc oxide coating instead of traditional solar cells, to form a kind of 3D solar cell. Mr. Wang suggested that by using fiber optic cables we can avoid big black solar panels on top of the buildings. The fiber optic cables, each one - two to three times the width of human hair, would be installed on roof tops in large quantities. The light is absorbed and turned into electrical energy along the cable.
An International team of scientists led by John Badding, a professor of chemistry at Penn State University announced a few days ago that his team developed a new chemical technique for depositing a non-crystalline form of silicon into the long ultra-thin pores of optical fibers. “Traditionally, hydrogenated amorphous silicon is created using an expensive laboratory device known as a plasma reactor” Badding explained. Plasma reactors use Silane - a silicon-hydrogenated compound in the development of optical fiber. The team could not use the plasma reactor as it uses low-pressure and it did not allow Silane molecules to be pushed into the long, thin holes into the optical fiber. The team developed a high-pressure technique that could force the molecules of Silane all the way down into the fiber and then convert them to amorphous hydrogenated silicon. Does it mean we will use more fiber optics in the solar industry with faster and more cost effective solar manufacturing?
Our scientists are racing to find better ways to use solar energy and two research groups recently announced their advances in solar energy. Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed tiny crystals called quantum dots which can capture high energy photons. In conventional solar cells, the photons in sunlight transfer their energy to electrons and the light “excites” the electron to jump from one layer of semiconductors to another to create electricity. Researchers are working on a phenomenon called Multiple Exciton Generation (MEG), to generate more than one electron when the photon strikes a solar cell. Using quantum dots there is a possibility of developing high proton electricity.
I sure hope to see advancements in the solar industry to revolutionize ways we harness light to generate electricity. I really want to see the solar panel manufacturer by our house do well and succeed.
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