Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2009/03/20/diy_teatime_solar_cells/
Boffin builds DIY solar cell from doughnuts and tea
Improbability drive?
Posted in Personal Tech, 20th March 2009 11:06 GMT
An inventor claims to have proven that a mixture of teatime staples from England and North America can be used to make solar panels.
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In a fast-paced video, the presenter runs through a process that essentially combines chemicals from tea and American-style sugared doughnuts to form a solar energy soaking film that can be applied to a sheet of glass.
The process isn’t easy and requires a fair amount of scientific kit, but he starts by extracting “titanium dioxide nanoparticles” from some powdered sugar doughnuts.
Roughly ten layers of these nanoparticles applied to a sheet of glass is, according to the video’s presenter, “pretty much a solar cell”.
But because this set-up on its own won’t work with “regular sunlight", the presenter next extracts organic dyes from a cup of sweet tea that enables the solar cell to “absorb light we can see”.
Finally, to prove that his invention works, the solar scientist hooks the cell up to a multimeter that appears to show an electrical current being generated from the DIY solar cell. ®