16-year-old Kelvin Doe -- Self-taught Inventor

          Kelvin Doe, a 16-year-old inventor from Sierra Leone, is known as the boy genius being both the youngest person to be awarded his country's presidential medal, and the youngest person ever offered a fellowship at MIT, where he spent a week as a visiting practitioner training MIT and Harvard undergraduates. He traveled 14 hours from Sierra Leone to attend the CGI conference this week.
          In middle school, the young boy would scavenge nearby trash yards in the capital of Freetown to find parts for his inventions. "I'd go to bed, then wake up after midnight," he told the audience with a laugh. "My mom would wake up most nights to see our living room transformed into a small electronic junkard." Doe had no formal engineering training, but he tinkered endlessly. "I just figured things out, just picked things and took them home and made things on my own. Sometimes it can take me a week, sometimes a month, but I just believe I can do it so I just keep on going."
          He first built small generators to solve what he views as his country's most pressing scarcity: electricity. "There was a problem affecting my community and I wanted to do something about it which was lack of transferred information from one community to another," he said. "I decided to a build a station for the people to be able to use to talk about issues, also educate people." After working as a radio engineer for his friends and neighbors, he'd pieced together enough skill and equipment to begin a radio station where he broadcast under the name DJ Focus. His inventive spirit only came under the spotlight when, just last year at age 15, he was discovered by a Sierra Leonean Ph.D. student at MIT during a high school innovation challenge.
           He is also currently working with Canadian provider Sierra Wifi to build solar panels and transmitters in all 400-odd schools and universities in Sierra Leone to power computers and bring Internet access to remote regions, all made possible by a $100,000 grant. Up next: a windmill prototype, which is a few months from being finished. "There are so many more problems I'd like to solve, how can human energy contribute to electricity."

A boy stands on a road at dawn in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on November 21, 2012

Recyclable Solar Cells Created using Trees

       Researches have developed recyclable and efficient solar cells using natural substrates from plants like trees. Georgia Institute of Technology and Purdue University researchers wrote in the journal Scientific Reports about how the solar cells can be recycled quickly in water at the end of their lifecycle. The team's solar cells are capable of reaching a power conversion efficiency of 2.7%.
       During the recycling process, the solar cells are immersed in water at room temperature, and within minutes, the CNC substrates on which the solar cells are fabricated can be separated easily into its major components.
       Georgia Tech College of Engineering Professor Bernard Kippelen, who led the study, said the method opens up the door for a truly recyclable, sustainable and renewable solar cell technology. "The development and performance of organic substrates in solar technology continues to improve, providing engineers with a good indication of future applications," Kippelen, who is also the director of Georgia Tech's Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics (COPE), said in a statement. "But organic solar cells must be recyclable. Otherwise we are simply solving one problem, less dependence on fossil fuels, while creating another, a technology that produces energy from renewable sources but is not disposable at the end of its lifecycle."
       Current organic solar cells are fabricated on glass or plastic, but neither is easily recyclable or very eco-friendly. If cells fabricated on glass were to break during the manufacturing process, the material would be difficult to dispose of. The team's cells are made from wood and are green, renewable and sustainable. "Our next steps will be to work toward improving the power conversion efficiency over 10%, levels similar to solar cells fabricated on glass or petroleum-based substrates," said Kippelen. The US forest product industry projects that tens of millions of tons of cellulose nanomaterials from wood could be produced once large-scale production begins in the next 5 years.
        Another new manufacturing method for producing solar cells was unveiled in the journal Advanced Materials in February. MIT researchers described a new process that allows scientists to passivate silicon at room temperatures, which helps with the high price of manufacturing computer chips and solar cells. In the MIT team's process, they decompose organic vapors over wires heated to 572 degrees Fahrenheit. Heating these wires requires less power than illuminating an ordinary light bulb. This process not only opens the door for cheaper solar panels, but also new applications for computer chips.

Source : Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com -- Your Universe Online

3D Printing can indeed help the Solar Power Industry too!

     The exact definition of the term "3-Dimension Printing" would be referred to as a process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually any shape of a digital model by using an additive process, which is the process of layers of material being laid down successively in different types of forms. Since the 21st century has begun, 3D printing has been used increasingly in various types of industries in society such as jewelry, dentistry, prototyping and even human organs.
     Energy strategist John Licata, whom also founded Blue Phoenix Inc., an independent energy and metals research company, comments his enthusiasm in seeing potential of how 3D printing can revolutionize solar panel and photovoltaic (PV) cell manufacturing. In this present stage of the rising solar power industry, it is accurate to point out that solar panels is somewhat lacking in energy storage and thus, solar cells must be developed to be more sustainable.
     With this complexity of solar power, John Licata has brought to our attention of possibly producing 3D solar cells, which, in turn, can capture more sunlight directly than with conventional PV cells. He believes that "they are more precise (using copper, indium, gallium, selenide: CIGS), less complex and has less weight." Researchers in Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) believe they can be 20% more efficient than solar panels.
     Another key factor he points out is the cost, which if 3D printing is successful in producing more efficient solar cells, it could drop the production cost by 50% (because they wouldn't be using costly materials as glass, poly-silicon, or indium). Not only this but he believes it would provide us more convenience in the future because it may be able to produce extremely thin solar cells onto paper, plastic or even fabric instead of the expensive glass used in solar panels. This, he theorizes, would help produce mass appeal for solar energy if it can be turned into wearable high-tech clothing, radios or other electronics. Perhaps in the future, we may find 3D printing incorporated with the use of solar power energy, who knows what the future holds for us.

5 innovations that will CHANGE the world! not the IPHONE

According to the reports of REN21 (Renewable Energy Network for the 21st Century), it was shown that global investments in renewable energy jumped 32% bringing an all time high of $211 billion, despite the current downturn of the economy. However, in many regions there is a big competition between the two odds of renewable & coal energy. But with the advancement of solar technology increasing every year with the latest solar development researched currently at MIT, it is likely coal will be going against it anytime soon. Here is a list of 5 development that could make a big impact towards our society as well as our economy that could also be safely executed against the burning of coal.
1. Nano-templated molecules that store energy
A professor named Jeffrey Grossman, associated with MIT, discovered and created a new molecule called azobenzene  that uses carbon nanotubes structuring the molecules that locks in and stores clean solar thermal energy. These molecules so called, "azobenzen", converts solar energy to a density of a lithium ion battery. Like what people say, "kill two birds with one stone", you have yourself a object that converts and stores infinite energy. 
2.Printing solar cells on possibly anything
A team led by Professor Karen Gleason discovered a way to imprint a solar cell into just about anything you could think of, using low temperature and vapor as opposed to liquid solutions. The paper imprinted with the solar cell is also highly durable withstanding it being folded a 1000 times with no change in performance. Imagine having solar cells imprinted all over your shirt and having to charge your mobile phone that remains in your pocket, that would be pretty awesome don't you think? 

Photo by Patrick Gillooly, Courtesy of MIT

3. Solar Thermal Power in flat panels

Professor Gang Chen discovered a whole new way to make solar power. Unlike ordinary solar panels that has been going on for some time now, Professor Gang Chen discovered a revolutionary new way to produce solar energy -micro solar thermal- in which theoretically could produce 8 times the efficiency of the world's best solar panel that are being manufactured today. Therefore, having it be a thermal process, Chen's system can heat up from ambient light even on a cloudy day. It is said that these panels can be made with very inexpensive and affordable material that could be appealing to many investors.

4. A virus to improve nano-solar cell efficiency

MIT graduate recently engineered a virus called "M13", that could effectively convert solar energy at a  more efficient rate, jumping from 8% to 10.6% efficency, boosting the rate to almost nearly one-third. The virus acts as a matching tool that pattern the nanotubes properly at a faster rate. 

5. Transparent solar cell could turn windows into power plants

See yourself in a skyscraper built with glass that could bind with the sun's rays while keeping their transparency? Well unfortunately several of these attempts had been made, resulting in terrible efficiency bringing it down less that 1% and also resulted in blocking too much light, depicting the glass useless. However, Professor electrical engineering professor Vladimir Bulvoic has made a breakthrough by engineering a new transparent layer of PV cells into the window glazing. The MIT team believes it can reach a high efficiency of 12% at a reduced cost over thin film solar cells. A team of researchers from UCLA had also developed a new kind of solar cell that is both efficient and transparent called the polymer solar cell that is almost 70% transparent and could generate energy through infrared light.

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