Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts
Showing posts with label patents. Show all posts

Thursday, February 28, 2008

UV coating on thin film solar cells

You might have read about a UCLA team that's developed a way to reduce UV degradation of thin film solar cell systems. They claim a patent for a "photon converting material" that converts UV into a lower-energy wavelength light. Yeah, it's actually just a fluorescent dye. Adding fluorescent dyes to CCDs has been common practice to increase the terrible efficiency of CCDs in the UV. I can't see what new non-obvious thing here needs to be patented.

This is the sort of thing a smart journalist needs to ask questions about, instead of taking a press release at face value.

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13372-green-invention-special-longlife-solar-cells.html
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/02/solar-cell-coating.php