RE: [Vo]:Liquid Glass
Ron, You have to wonder - with liquid glass and a commercial laser engraver (etcher) which is similar to an ink jet printer - http://www.epiloglaser.com/product_line.htm and some imagination and metal-coated film, if one could not etch the circuits with the printer, then coat this film with the glass, and thereby make a large and fairly efficient homemade nano-solar thin film photocell array... Jones -Original Message- From: Ron Wormus This sounds very cool. http://www.physorg.com/news184310039.html Ron
RE: [Vo]:Liquid Glass
Jones, That would be an interesting project. More than one layer would be needed though I don't know how accurately you could align the sheet for multiple passes. I think we will see some of the commercial panels drop in price. In our local paper just this last week was an article on leasing a 10KW array for 20 yrs for just over $100 a month that included installation maintenance. That is less than my current electricity utility bill so I am going to look into it. I am not sure I have enough roof space though. What I really need is a heater! Its been an unusually cold winter on the CO front range this year my gas bills crazy high just to keep this old place around 60 degrees. Ron --On Tuesday, February 09, 2010 7:51 AM -0800 Jones Beene jone...@pacbell.net wrote: Ron, You have to wonder - with liquid glass and a commercial laser engraver (etcher) which is similar to an ink jet printer - http://www.epiloglaser.com/product_line.htm and some imagination and metal-coated film, if one could not etch the circuits with the printer, then coat this film with the glass, and thereby make a large and fairly efficient homemade nano-solar thin film photocell array... Jones -Original Message- From: Ron Wormus This sounds very cool. http://www.physorg.com/news184310039.html Ron
RE: [Vo]:Liquid Glass
-Original Message- From: Ron Wormus What I really need is a heater! It's been an unusually cold winter on the CO front range this year my gas bills crazy high just to keep this old place around 60 degrees. You should never have given up on those fractional hydrogen gas-discharge tubes, Ron :) Seriously, folks - space heating (yawn) is probably the number one most useful application for either LENR or f/H. It's not fancy, and maybe that's the problem; and you may only need it for 5 months a year, so palladium is out, but still ... where's the beef? Lest we not forget our history - eighteen years ago, Thermacore, Inc. now a subsidiary of Modine International, ran an nickel light-water electrolytic cell for over one year continuously for DARPA - and produced more free energy in the form of low grade heat than the entire US hot fusion boondoggle has given us (probably $20 billion down the drain in that same time frame)... You cannot ever convince me that at tenth of the US investment in tokamaks - if shifted to that program in the early 1990s, would not have resulted in the availability of a simple space heater for wintertime use. Jones
Re: [Vo]:Liquid Glass
Jones, Thanks for posting that reference! Cool! Actual desktop USB interface computer laser cutters. And they sell used ones on occasion too. That stuff reminds me of the liquid sodium silicate I used to play with as a kid. It was sold under the name Eisenglass I think. It came as a viscous liquid in quart cans. It was used to paint eggs (still in the shells) in order to preserve them longer I think. This lost importance when refrigerators became common. I added chemicals like copper sulfate to the Eisenglass to grow a chemical garden in a glass jar. It formed neat plant-like tentacles. I don't know where I got the recipe for that. I think it might have been Sci. Am. or Pop. Sci. I am curious as to why you think circuits have to be etched? To use silicon for a solar cell I think it has to be doped, so as to create a PN boundary. It is the potential drop across the PN boundary that actually drives a solar cell. The sun merely creates the ions in the gap so they can be accelerated across it. I do wonder if it might be possible to use a zinc or zinc plated substrate (zinc is a hole conductor) coated with silicon that is chemically doped as an N (electron) conductor. If so, the remaining things necessary to create a solar cell are a transparent conductive overcoating, and possibly the printing of a very conductive metallic collector circuit on top. On Feb 9, 2010, at 6:51 AM, Jones Beene wrote: Ron, You have to wonder - with liquid glass and a commercial laser engraver (etcher) which is similar to an ink jet printer - http://www.epiloglaser.com/product_line.htm and some imagination and metal-coated film, if one could not etch the circuits with the printer, then coat this film with the glass, and thereby make a large and fairly efficient homemade nano-solar thin film photocell array... Jones -Original Message- From: Ron Wormus This sounds very cool. http://www.physorg.com/news184310039.html Ron Best regards, Horace Heffner http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
RE: [Vo]:Liquid Glass
-Original Message- From: Horace Heffner I am curious as to why you think circuits have to be etched? To use silicon for a solar cell I think it has to be doped, so as to create a PN boundary. It is the potential drop across the PN boundary that actually drives a solar cell. The sun merely creates the ions in the gap so they can be accelerated across it. Yes, all that is true, but as I understand the factors that drive photocell efficiency - the etching is required to get makeup electrons to the depleted sites with as little resistance as possible, and in the opposite path - to remove them. Metal lines may not be required for this, since silicon can be doped to conduct reasonably well, but it is probably more efficient that way. In the case of liquid glass the cool thing is that one could also (probably) dope various layers easily by adding an electrolyte or nanopowder in a few percent - right to the product - and apply in thin films. That could be done easier than with a crystalline material - heck you might even be able to do triple or quadruple layering with liquid glass if- as Ron mentioned, the circuit layer(s), could be matched up... aluminum coated mylar might work and has the advantage of transparency. You will probably see this in a high school science fair project soon - if it is indeed this simple to pull off. Jones
[Vo]:Liquid Glass
This sounds very cool. http://www.physorg.com/news184310039.html Ron
