Solar Cell Built with Spinach
Uses photosynthesis to generate electricity
Betterhumans Staff
A solar cell made with spinach has been developed that promises electronic devices incorporating photosynthesis, the highly efficient process plants use to produce energy from sunlight.
Researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, the University of Tennessee and the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC collaborated to create the device, which they call the world's first solid-state photosynthetic solar cell.
"We have crossed the first hurdle of successfully integrating a photosynthetic protein molecular complex with a solid-state electronic device," says MIT researcher Marc Baldo.
Ground greens
Plants are highly efficient at converting sunlight to energy, but exploiting their photosynthesizing machinery for electronic devices has proven difficult because biological materials need water and salt to survive but these can destroy electronics.
To overcome this problem, Baldo, MIT's Shuguang Zhang and colleagues used a synthetic peptide that stabilizes protein complexes on cold, hard surfaces and is thought to bind small amounts of water.
To get protein complexes derived from chloroplasts, organelles in plant cells that conduct photosynthesis, they spun ground spinach in a centrifuge, purified the results further and cajoled them into a water-soluble state.
Protein sandwich
Stabilized by the synthetic peptides, the protein complexes are placed on a thin piece of glass coated with gold and covered by a soft organic semiconductor and then a layer of metal.
A prototype chip has been tested using laser light for a proof-of-concept demonstration.
"An important caveat is that we got very little current out, mostly because we had just a thin layer of the complexes in our devices," says Baldo. "Most of the optical excitation passed straight through without being absorbed. Of the light that was absorbed, we estimate that we converted around 12% to charge."
The researchers aim to achieve 20% power conversion or more by assembling many layers of protein complexes on rough or three-dimensional structures to increase surface area.
The chip's lifespan will also need to be improved for practical applications, as the peptides used only keep the protein complexes stable for about three weeks.
The research is reported in the journal NanoLetters.
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