decouverte du MIT:popeye fait du solaire

September 2, 2004

MIT Team Demonstrate Plant Protein Photovoltaic Cell
Marc Baldo and a collaborator at MIT have taken spinach chloroplast proteins and worked them into a photovoltaic solar cell that generates electricity.

Baldo’s team isolated a variety of photosynthetic proteins from spinach and sandwiched them between two layers of conducting material. When light was shone on to the tiny cell, an electrical current was generated. Their discovery is reported in Nano Letters1.

Plant chloroplasts normally capture photons to excite electrons to drive photosynthesis. The machinery is there in chloroplasts to cause electron flow in the presence of light. If that machinery could be massaged into a form that would create lasting photovoltaic cells then it holds the potential of providing a way to make cheap photovoltaics. This idea has been around for a while and back in the late 1970s there was a short burst of funding for plant biochemists to work on chloroplast electrochemistry. The advocates of one proposed approach claim chlorophyll-photovoltaic cell may be able to convert 72% of sunlight to electricity.

anyone knows about CVC chrolovoltaic cell in canada?

Comments

• Share |