Nanoantennas Could Collect 80% Solar Energy, Continue to Work at Night
January 9th, 2008Immediately after reading this story, I emailed the U.S. Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory to find out how much money had been allocated to this research.
The helpful INL media relations person wrote back:
The INL has spent about $4 million to date on the energy management aspects of this project… The INL team is looking for industry partners to support further research.
That’s $4 million (so far) with INL looking to private industry to support further research. Sorry if I’m repeating what she wrote, but it so incredible that I want to get it clear!
You know where this is going, don’t you…
The U.S. Government spends more on the war in Iraq in twenty minutes than it has spent on a technology that captures 80% of available solar energy and, “could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.”
Now, maybe you’ve heard of a company called Lockheed Martin; the largest armaments manufacturer in the world. In 2006, Lockheed Martin had defense related revenues of more than $36 billion. Four million dollars—the amount the U.S. Government spent on the nanoantenna research so far—represents about .01% of Lockheed Martin’s defense related revenues in 2006. That’s one one hundredth of 1%.
There’s a power crisis alright, and it has nothing to do with energy.
Via: Idaho National Laboratory:
Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory, along with partners at Microcontinuum Inc. (Cambridge, MA) and Patrick Pinhero of the University of Missouri, are developing a novel way to collect energy from the sun with a technology that could potentially cost pennies a yard, be imprinted on flexible materials and still draw energy after the sun has set.
The new approach, which garnered two 2007 Nano50 awards, uses a special manufacturing process to stamp tiny square spirals of conducting metal onto a sheet of plastic. Each interlocking spiral “nanoantenna” is as wide as 1/25 the diameter of a human hair.
Because of their size, the nanoantennas absorb energy in the infrared part of the spectrum, just outside the range of what is visible to the eye. The sun radiates a lot of infrared energy, some of which is soaked up by the earth and later released as radiation for hours after sunset. Nanoantennas can take in energy from both sunlight and the earth’s heat, with higher efficiency than conventional solar cells.
“I think these antennas really have the potential to replace traditional solar panels,” says physicist Steven Novack, who spoke about the technology in November at the National Nano Engineering Conference in Boston.
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Commercial solar panels usually transform less that 20 percent of the usable energy that strikes them into electricity. Each cell is made of silicon and doped with exotic elements to boost its efficiency. “The supply of processed silicon is lagging, and they only get more expensive,” Novack says. He hopes solar nanoantennas will be a more efficient and sustainable alternative.
The team estimates individual nanoantennas can absorb close to 80 percent of the available energy. The circuits themselves can be made of a number of different conducting metals, and the nanoantennas can be printed on thin, flexible materials like polyethylene, a plastic that’s commonly used in bags and plastic wrap. In fact, the team first printed antennas on plastic bags used to deliver the Wall Street Journal, because they had just the right thickness.
By focusing on readily available materials and rapid manufacturing from inception, Novack says, the aim is to make nanoantenna arrays as cheap as inexpensive carpet.
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While the nanoantennas are easily manufactured, a crucial part of the process has yet to be fully developed: creating a way to store or transmit the electricity. Although infrared rays create an alternating current in the nanoantenna, the frequency of the current switches back and forth ten thousand billion times a second. That’s much too fast for electrical appliances, which operate on currents that oscillate only 60 times a second. So the team is exploring ways to slow that cycling down, possibly by embedding energy conversion devices like tiny capacitors directly into the antenna structure as part of the nanoantenna imprinting process.
“At this point, these antennas are good at capturing energy, but they’re not very good at converting it,” says INL engineer Dale Kotter, “but we have very promising exploratory research under way.” Kotter and Novack are also exploring ways to transform the high-frequency alternating current (AC) to direct current (DC) that can be stored in batteries. One potential candidate is high-speed rectifiers, special diodes that would sit at the center of each spiral antenna and convert the electricity from AC to DC. The team has a patent pending on a variety of potential energy conversion methods. They anticipate they are only a few years away from creating the next generation of solar energy collectors.
