Plastic solar cells : understanding the special additive

Solar cells use freely available sunlight to make electricity. At the present time, solar electricity does not come cheap, because solar panels are rather expensive. Now imagine that we could reduce costs by printing solar panels like we print newspapers! We can do just that with plastic solar cells. In this article, we explain the basic working principles of these novel plastic solar cells and then show how a stunning threefold increase in solar energy efficiency can be achieved by including a special additive to the printing ink. The function of such a special additive seems almost magical, but as scientists we know that true magic is really rare and we simply had to find out why and how it works. That was the subject of our recent investigations and in this article we describe how we divulged the secret of the special additive

New operational modes for the Ta2O5-based electrolyte conductance cell

Based on the recently presented conductance cell, two specific operational modes are proposed. In the oscillator mode, the conductivity of the electrolyte determines the frequency of an oscillator, experimentally obtaining a shift from 10 to 27 kHz for a KCl concentration range from 0.5 to 100 mM. In the pole mode, an inductor is placed in series with the cell, giving the real electrolyte resistance at the resonance frequency of the circuit, resulting in a linear relation between the log of the output voltage from 4 to 1000 mV as a function of the log of the KCl concentration, ranging from 0.2 to 100 mM