Reported widely late last year as a “Junkyard Wars” contraption, University of Toronto researcher Illan Kramer’s spray rig for coating just about anything with a thin film of colloidal quantum dots (QCDs) offers the potential for making Kramer’s hopes come true. “My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof.” Kramer is a post-doctoral fellow with The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Centre. His spray equipment, composed of a “spray nozzle used in steel mills to cool steel with a fine mist of water, and a few regular air brushes from an art store,” manages to spread colloidal quantum dots with the precision usually found in atomic layer deposition managed in laboratory or carefully-controlled manufacturing conditions. He admits to the unaesthetic look of the setup, but notes that the $1,000 sprayLD system …
Solar Cells – All That Glitters Need Not Be Gold
The search for less expensive solar cells drives many lines of research these days, with trends toward smaller collectors and less expensive materials leading the way. Many solar cells use gold and other pricey metals to provide junctions within the cell structure. Gold closed Friday at $1,204.00 per troy ounce on the London Metal Exchange, and nickel at $10.01 per pound. That would make gold worth $17,558 per avoirdupois pound (14.583 troy ounces per pound), or 1,754 times more expensive than nickel. According to Gizmag, University of Toronto investigators found that substituting nickel for the previously used gold as collection contacts in their colloidal quantum dot solar cells provided equal performance, at a 40 to 80-percent drop in solar cell prices. Following that math, current pricing of solar cells such as Ascent’s thin film units at $6.00 per Watt could drop to $2.40 to $1.20 per Watt; near the $1.00 per Watt goal many cell makers have long sought. …