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New Solar Cells Can Turn Carbon Dioxide And Sunlight Into Usable Energy

Photo from Pixabay

Solar cells that convert carbon dioxide into clean, renewable energy may seem like a pipe dream, but engineers from the University of Illinois at Chicago appeared to have made this a possible reality, International Business Times reports.

In research funded by the US Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, the UIC team has engineered a potentially game-changing solar cell that can efficiently, directly convert atmospheric carbon dioxide into readily usable hydrocarbon fuel, using the sun’s energy and at low production costs.

Unlike solar cells available now, which turn sunlight into electricity and use heavy batteries to store energy, this new system was made to mimic how plants work – converting carbon dioxide into energy. It’s appropriately nicknamed the Artificial Leaf.

Senior author Amin Salehi-Khojin and his team said in a UIC press release that their design is able to solve solar cell technology problems in one go, one of which is removing carbon from the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide is a particularly troublesome greenhouse gas, because it can stay in the atmosphere longer than other gases and therefore contributes greatly to global warming by trapping heat around the planet. NASA has reported that the Earth’s CO2 levels have surpassed four hundred PPM, or parts per million, in 2013 – a first for the planet.

These new solar cells also promise the efficient production of energy-dense fuel, providing enough energy for developing countries around the world. The fuel produced by the cells is “synthesis gas, a mixture of hydrogen gas and carbon monoxide,” which can then “be burned directly, or converted into diesel or other hydrocarbon fuels.”

Salehi-Khojin, who is also an assistant professor  of mechanical and industrial engineering at UIC, says that their solar cell is photosynthetic, not photovoltaic. He said,

Instead of producing energy in an unsustainable one-way route from fossil fuels to greenhouse gas, we can now reverse the process and recycle atmospheric carbon into fuel using sunlight.

There have been attempts to convert carbon dioxide into a burnable form of carbon, but previous methods have proven to be inefficient and expensive, requiring precious metals such as silver.

The Artificial Leaf uses nanoflake tungsten diselenide, a material 20 times cheaper than other precious metals, and works a thousand times faster as a catalyst in the chemical process.

This sola cell technology can potentially be adapted for use in large scale activities like solar farming, as well as to smaller-scale ventures. In the future, Salehi-Khojin said, it may even be useful on Mars, as the Red Planet’s atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide, if water is found on its surface.

 

 

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