The sheet capable of converting sunlight and water in storable fuel makes it the ultimate in solar energy. Now, researchers say that they mimic a way, this seemingly simple feat have found.
By Dan Nocera of the Massachusetts Institute of technology and colleagues developed technology could finally makes a home and bring electricity to the developing countries with little more than a chip in a bucket of water sunk. The device could not even save the energy for when that is Sun.
The new technology copied the process of photosynthesis in which electrons in a sheet, which then free water make the Sun's energy to hydrogen and oxygen, the stored energy for the plant divided.
"Whether you it or do not recognize, leaves with electricity are sums of money," Nocera said. "they have not only all the wires in them."
The leaves must have two catalysts to this reaction to work, and as well as the solar cells do. Nocera's breakthrough is in the search after two affordable catalysts which can do the response.
The sunlight is with the same silicon material, the a typical solar panel is covered, but instead of following wires that can charge a battery, the coated silicon with catalytic converters in the water is submerged.
"I take the chip and put it in this bottle of water and only go can and hold it up to the Sun and you would begin to see bubbles from hydrogen and oxygen," said Nocera.
The hydrogen and oxygen could be used later in a fuel cell to generate electricity, as they recombine to water.
The discovery is not, because it has the first time researchers have made this a cell, but because it cheap to use the device practical is the first materials enough, Nocera said at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in AnaheimCalif.
The device was the efficiency of today's solar cells, he added, meaning that an array of panels on a budget roof enough, the House makes match.
But a goal for the team of the research is to provide energy for people in developing countries, in particular India and rural China, he said. A key feature of his system in this goal is that the device runs with what is also water available; It must be not high purity.
"The fact that you can only go there and when it start a puddle, it-, which is something that is very efficient for us," he said.
This could be also useful for military where it would be applications ultra-pure water lug around too cumbersome.
This is a technical challenge, from the laboratory rooftop to figure out how to capture for later use of the oxygen and hydrogen, and they save. "Goes, be engineering sensitive to some," he said. It remains to be seen how much this aspect will be.
Today's photovoltaic modules can solar power stored in a battery, but "much is the cost of a solar panel in the wiring, packaging," said Nocera. These expensive parts are eliminated with the artificial leaf. "In the principle which could be much cheaper."
John Turner of the national renewable energy laboratory, the first an efficient "artificial leaf" in 1998, but by using materials to expensive and unstable to market shown said "we us the way to the sustainable low-cost, carbon free production of hydrogen and a hydrogen economy can have." on the advance,
He added: "the key are they take laboratory equipment and it turned into an editable prototype."
The company Sun Catalytix of Cambridge, mass. markets this technology.
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