I’m convinced that the scientist in you always wanted to create juice. High voltage! … My thoughts exactly.
And actually… it turns out to be rather simple.
Let me explain:
- Take a tin coated piece of glass (can also be coated with titanium dioxide) – let it rest for a half hour in the cooking liquid of onion peel - after this half hour, rinse it with water and leave to dry.
While the glass is in the onion peel liquid you can prepare the counter electrode.
This positive electrode is created from a conductive SnO2 coated glass plate - Use a Volt meter to check which side of the glass is conductive (it’s the rough side) – Use a lead pencil to aply a thin graphite layer to this side’s surface.
Take the dried glassplate and put the counter electrode side on top, offset the glass plates so that the edges of each plate are exposed - add one or two drops of iodide electrolyte solution in between these glass plates - use two clips to hold the plates together, the result when mesuring with your volt meter is about 0,4V.
Low voltage indeed, … ah, but highly satisfying to see that you’ve just created your very own solar cell.
Here is a website that gives a nice step by step overview too, but in this case they actually prepare the glass plates them selves too. In the above case we just worked with prepared glass.
These Solar cells were made during a 3 day workshop on Photovoltaics, later this summer nadine will open its doors again for the second part, we’ll keep you posted on content and exact dates.
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