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Solar Cells from Donuts and Tea

2009-04-06 14:31:26.051941+00 by Dan Lyke 3 comments

YouTube video: How to make a solar cell with powdered sugar donuts and tea. Turns out powdered sugar donuts use a lot of titanium dioxide to get that whiteness, and with that and a little bit of ingenuity you can make thin film solar cells. Via MarkV's 3,000th post over at Brainwagon.

[ related topics: Movies Robotics Embedded Devices Video Photovoltaics ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-07 17:43:01.038533+00 by: andylyke [edit history]

hmmmmm.... I like it. I wonder whether the powdered sugar on donuts is different from the powdered sugar in a box. More to the point, I wonder where one can get nanocrystalline TiO2

#Comment Re: is made: 2009-04-07 18:19:58.167424+00 by: Dan Lyke

Looks like ScienceLab.com has it for seventy eight bucks for half a kilo. In digging through for that, it looks like your local high school may have some as well.

The other sad part about the search results as I was digging for this is that this looks to be yet another of those situations where, because we've shipped all of our actually productive work elsewhere, it's quite a bit cheaper to extract it from a manufactured product than it is to get the raw materials.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-04-07 21:44:50.655361+00 by: ebradway

Reminds me of Larry's recipe for explosives - scraping the white powder off old dog turds...