Christopher Moore is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Coastal Carolina University. He lives in Myrtle Beach, SC with his wife and two children.Powdered doughnuts are good for you! At least, if you’re interested in solar power. Yes, even you can build your own solar cell using powdered doughnuts and tea leaves.
Prashant Kamat’s lab at Notre Dame has shown how the titanium dioxide (TiO2) can be extracted from powdered doughnuts and used to build a usable photovoltaic cell. Wired magazine has the details.
I’m seeing at least a couple of really cool student projects in this. Expecially considering I have been focusing on a specific transparent conductor (ZnO), which is similar to TiO2. Extracting the TiO2 from the powdered sugar and then diluting in ethyl alcohol (basically Vodka), should result in a suspension of ~100 nm diameter TiO2 nanoparticles. We could then evaporate this as a film on whatever substrate we want. A simple optical experiment to determine nanoparticle diameters in solution, and then some electrical characterization of the films. I might even be able to get a simple diode out of this.
Any students interested in doing science with doughnuts and vodka?
Update: I’m always amazed at how much Google seems to love this site. Only a few hours after posting this, I began seeing traffic coming from Google due to the search term “doughnut solar cell” or a variation. Sure enough, we’re on Google’s top page even though the original article on Wired is over 1 year old and has been extensively blogged about elsewhere during that time. This means that I have to blog about my lab’s future playing with the concept.
nice info.
I think, we are all have to learn about alternative energy and applied it in our life. Thx
[...] discussed this project before. However, we have just recently gotten around to doing it. The process was pretty [...]
Now I love doughnuts even more!