Thursday, July 15, 2010

Building Solar Cells

Today we started on the actual work phase of our chemistry projects. The TAs had obtained all the necessary materials for us ahead of time so we were able to start immediately. To begin with we coated a piece of glass in a titanium oxide solution and then coated it with raspberry juice. The raspberry juice allows electrons to enter the titanium oxide which acts as a semiconductor. After that we put the two plates together and allowed potassium iodine to get between them using capillary action which served as an electrolyte to complete the circuit. The resulting creation was able to create some voltage but only on a very limited scale.

2 comments:

  1. What do the gloves do?

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  2. Michael,

    In the back of your mind aren’t you wondering how they determined that raspberry juice was the exact thing they needed? I’m betting that they were struggling with this experiment and were on trial # 4,321 when a lab assistant suddenly spilled his lunch beverage on the experiment and the meter went off the scale. That’s usually the way things work, isn’t it?

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