REAL LIFE NEWS: SOLAR CELLS PICK UP GOOD VIBRATIONS
by Hazed
Solar cells work more efficiently if you play music to them. Yes, really. What’s more, they prefer pop to classical.
It’s all to do with the vibrations. An article in New Scientist explains that traditional solar cells which are made from silicon, and which are efficient at converting sunlight into electricity, are expensive to produce and awkward to work with. So scientists have been trying to find alternatives.
At Queen Mary College in London, they’ve been experimenting with zinc oxide. It’s a lot cheaper and can be made into thin, flexible films which are easier to work with. But it’s not as efficient as silicon panels – with an efficiency of just 1.2% which is a fraction of silicon’s efficiency.
But zinc oxide has another property, which is that nanoscale rods made from the stuff generate an electric field when they vibrate in response to sound.
Steve Dunn, one of the scientists, said, “We tried our initial tests with various types of music, including pop, rock and classical,” and that rock and pop turned out to be the most effective. That’s possibly to do with the wider range of frequencies. They used a signal generator to produce sounds which were precisely measured to be similar to ambient noise and found the efficiency rose from 1.2% to 1.8%. This suggests that zinc oxide solar arrays could be used in noisy places such as next to busy roads, to improve their efficiency.
“There are lots of places where this might be useful,” says Dunn. “On top of air-conditioning units, on military vehicles or on military personnel where lightweight power sources can be used to supplement heavy power requirements.”
So turn up that music and soak up the power from the sun!
