PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD The Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory claims to have found a way to combine synthetic polymers with living proteins to create a self-repairing solar-cell technology whose efficiency will not degrade over time.
Today solar panels are available using a wide variety of materials whose prices are set according to the efficiencies obtained. For instance, the highest achieved efficiencies to date (as high as 25 percent) come from expensive multi-band gallium arsenide (GaAs) solar cells, which are only affordable by military and space applications. Next in efficiency comes pure crystalline silicon solar cells (about 15 percent efficient), then amorphous silicon (about 10 percent) followed by thin-film polymer-based solar panels, which are the lowest in both cost and efficiency (as low as 5 percent).
The one parameter, however, that all solar panels share is that they quickly begin degrading in performance when actually exposed to sunlight. The cheap, thin-film polymer-based solar panels are the worst. Exposure to ultra-violet (UV) radiation in sunlight quickly breaks down the organic materials, often degrading performance by as much as a percent per month when first deployed. And even pure crystalline silicon solar cells degrade by about a half a percent efficiency per year over their approximately 20-year lifetime.
DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory uses neutron scattering on lamellar
structure of a hydrogen-producing, biohybrid composite material confirming that
man-made polymers can self-repair using light harvesting proteins in green
plants. (Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
Plants, on the other hand, use self-repairing mechanisms akin to the kind of tissue regeneration performed when you cut your finger. Such regeneration allows their sunlight conversion efficiency to remain constant despite the damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation. Laboratories around the world have been trying to duplicate this natural conversion process called photosynthesis, but progress has been slow.
Now DoE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory claims to have a solution for these vexing problems. The solution combines a man-made polymer with living plant proteins in a manner that allows the continuous self-repair of its bio-hybrid photo-conversion material. Like plant photosynthesis, the system produces a chemical fuel—hydrogen—which can easily stored and used on-demand without the need for a battery.
Called the light harvesting complex II (LHC-II), the self-assembly process results in a continually renewed synthetic membrane similar to natural photosynthetic membranes. ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) used small angle neutron scattering analysis to confirm the performance of LHC-II. Next the team is working on adding a platinum catalyst to perform the conversion of sunlight into hydrogen fuel.
The research, led by ORNL researcher Hugh O'Neill, William Heller and Kunlun Hong, included support from the Chemical Sciences Division, Neutron Scattering Sciences Division, the Center for Structural Molecular Biology and the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences. Funding was provided by the DoE Office of Science.
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