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Red Wine And Solar Cells

I have discussed the increasing efficiency of solar cells before, but here is great way to deal with the negative effects of bad spots. Just make sure you don’t use your most expensive bottle…
“Solar cell efficiencies range from about seven percent for low-cost thin film materials to about 24 percent for high-quality silicon crystal. The University of Toledo method boosts the efficiency of the low-cost photovoltaic materials, which promises to make generating electricity from sunlight more cost-effective. Amorphous silicon solar cells are made by spreading a thin film of silicon on a surface. Some polycrystalline semiconductor materials can also be made into thin films. Such cells have bad spots because it’s nearly impossible to uniformly manufacture such large areas -typically a square meter- of the material. The researchers fixed the problem by using red wine to cause electrochemical reactions where the currents are drawn to the bad spots that blocked those spots. A mixture of an acid, water and aniline also works, according to the researchers.”

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