Caffeine Cranks Up Solar Cells | Hacker News Reader

Caffeine Cranks Up Solar Cells

spectrum.ieee.org

79 pointsjonbaer30 comments

The big element missing from the headline: this isn't about improving existing commercial solar cells.

The caffeine improvement is specific to perovskite-based solar cells, rather than commercial-use silicon. Perovskite is expected to reach higher efficiencies than silicon at far lower production costs, but isn't viable because of rapid degradation and problems producing panels at scale. The good news, though, is that caffeine's improvements work on exactly those problems, raising defect-free crystal size and increasing panel longevity while in use. And it's an absolutely massive increase: the lifespan gain is more than an order of magnitude.

An old article, but apparently wine also helps them...

https://www.winespectator.com/webfeature/show/id/Take-Sunlig...

Also superconductors...

https://phys.org/news/2011-05-red-wine-clue-superconductive-...

And photographic wine can be developed in coffee as well as wine... related?

>apparently wine also helps them

Just imaging what Buckfast would do!

Not even Buckfast will make solar work in Scotland.

Maybe Irn Bru will do it?

Just how was this discovered? "Hey, no food or drink in the lab. DARN IT - look what you did now!"

I'm wondering if somewhere someone has a program running a simulation on combinations of chemicals to see what would happen.

That's how we ended up with microwave ovens.

> In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven#Discovery

Lol what else was melting if the chocolate in his pocket was melting?

This is only barely related but when we bought our house the (ancient) gas stove was malfunctioning. I looked up the brand (Modern Maid, I think) and was very surprised to learn they were a subsidiary of Raytheon. The thought of a gas appliance made by a weapons manufacturer was, a little unsettling. Replaced that thing pretty quickly.

Don't go looking too deep into ol' General Electric then.

I don't understand this. Were you afraid your stove was a weapon in disguise?

No, it was a joke. I only know Raytheon as a weapons / explosives company. Had no idea they had a consumer products arm at some point (unlike GE which at one point owned everything including film studios, which is fairly common knowledge.) Given that we were concerned we had a leaky gas appliance...

Better throw out all your GE, GM, and even Mattel products then. Nearly every major manufacturer does, or has at one time, been involved in weapons manufacture.

Basically any computing device as well since all the processor manufacturers have defense contracts.

Interestingly there is a rendering of what appears to be a Predator drone on the AMD website:

https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-aero-defense-soluti...

Thats it, Im only going to support intel from now on. /s

Also those hipster glass canning jars from Ball.

People: I replaced it because it was malfunctioning, not actually because it had a connection to Raytheon. It was too old to be worth fixing.

The article compares caffeine vs. no-caffeine but I'd be interested to see how caffeine compares to other additives. For all we know H2O could do the same thing

FTA: > UCLA professor Yang Yang’s lab chock-full of coffee drinkers spent several years searching for a stability-enhancing additive to turn famously unstable perovskite PV cells into a useful product. Then, on a lark, Yang's graduate student Rui Wang suggested they try adding caffeine to the mix.

They tested different compounds for years before finding one that works - I don' think it would add much to the article to list every one of them.

So an immediate increase in the efficiency and significantly improved longevity over time... doesn't this basically multiply the panels effectiveness as time goes on? That's incredible this gain could come from caffeine

I think improved longevity over time is relative to non-caffeinated solar cells, caffeinated solar cells last longer (they don't improve over time)

It looks like about a 13x longevity improvement over the tested timespan, which is absolutely nuts.

It's specific to perovskite solar cells, though, which aren't in commercial use because their lifespans are so short. They're one of the 'holy grail' high-efficiency technologies like magnesium batteries, so a 13x increase in lifespan is at once hugely important and not enough to make them realistic.

TFA doesn't show die-off, though. The graph just shows "after 1300 hours at 85C, still producing at 86% output". The slope doesn't imply a drop right after (but of course who knows).

Good point, thanks.

My assumption was that since the slope looks fairly flat, this was still a nonstarter for most applications - 86% after 2 months is good progress, but commercial standards are 80% after 20 years. Even so, it's a big step up from the material's past of failing outright after short spans.

This looks cool, but I am afraid it could drive up coffee prices. That would be very sad.

According to wikipedia, caffeine can be synthesized, but is normally just obtained as a byproduct of decaffeination.

If anything would increase in price, it would be energy drinks and other caffeinated beverages. Price increase would probably be minuscule, as I imagine the demand for solar panels is dwarfed by the demand for soda and energy drinks,.

I think it will drive down the price of synthetic caffeine.

Maybe, but that is only because synthetic caffeine is currently not very competitive with the free caffeine produced as a by-product of decaf manufacture. The price of existing naturally-derived caffeine (and possibly the coffee from which it is derived) could rise, which is not a pleasant thought.

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