Green Tech: New Engine's Powered By Shock Waves!

          Michigan researchers have built a prototype of a new auto motor that does away with pistons, crankshafts and valves, replacing the old internal combustion engine with a disc-shaped shock wave generator. It could slash the weight of hybrid cars and reduce auto emissions by 90 percent.  This is an enormous improvement compared to conventional vehicles, where about 85 percent of fuel simply blows out the back end.

        The new generator is about the size of a saucepot, and would replace the 1,000-pound power train in most cars — no transmission, cooling system, emissions regulation or fluids needed. 

 The generator would also use about 60 percent of fuel for propulsion, which is a dramatic improvement over typical car engines, which use only 15 percent of fuel for forward movement. The system could also make cars 20 percent lighter, improving fuel economy even more.

The keyword for the research team is shock. Their generator’s heart is a rotor that contains wavy radial channels. This construction allows for a much better exploitation of energy. After ignition, an air-fuel mixture enters the chambers of the generator. Due to the rotating model, the outlets and subsequently the inlets, too, are blocked, so the mixture can’t escape as it would in other engines. The resulting high pressure induces shock waves that rip through the car, and keep the engine roaring. Compression, temperature, density – everything is used in a more sustainable way, while pistons, camshaft and valves become superfluous.

The "shock wave" prototype, a project made possible with funding from the US Department of Energy, can replace nearly 1,000 lbs. of engine, transmission, cooling system, emissions, and fluids. Companies could consider building vehicles that are lighter, smaller, and—greener.  And with an overall larger awareness from the population to save energy rising, the demand is definitely there. The team in Michigan hopes to have an even larger 25-kilowatt prototype by the end of this year.

Green Tech: Harvesting Our Own Energy!

I find myself thinking about alternative energy sources a lot and one idea that constantly pops into my head when thinking about future technology is the idea of using the things we do every day to store up usable power.  It’s a fascinating area of Green Tech, the harvesting of energy from our own bodies to power devices. Most of us create quite a bit of energy everyday whether it’s running, biking, swimming, skiing, even walking, etc.

 There has been a steady stream of concepts from designers and prototypes from labs lately though few are really viable. Fujitsu’s latest breakthrough in harvesting energy from both light and heat could be the next big thing for micro-energy harvesting via wearable technology. Without the need for electrical wiring or battery replacements, the company hopes it could be part of commercial products by 2015.

                Fujitsu’s hybrid device does what normally requires separate devices, one to harvests heat, one for vibrations, one for only light, etc. The company recognizes that alternatives for generating micro-energy are going the increase in demand in the next few years, and so they’re working to get ahead of the curve. It also recognizes that harvesting ambient energy from light, vibration, heat and so forth yields minute results, so hybrid devices are a smart way to go.

Fujitsu Laboratories writes that it has "successfully developed an organic material that is suitable for a generator in both photovoltaic and thermoelectric modes.

               The organic material features a high generating efficiency that can produce power from even indoor lighting in photovoltaic mode, and it can also generate power from heat in its thermoelectric mode. Since the organic material and its process cost are inexpensive, production costs can be greatly reduced

The company notes that the device will be perfect in the medical field, gathering energy from patients and their environments to run small life-saving devices, or it can be used for tasks like remote sensors for weather forecasting, or monitoring the integrity of structures like bridges, and other needs.

I’m not expecting it to be the biggest miracle breakthrough device that could power every handheld gadget, but it is a very interesting progression of renewable energy harvesting technology that could be very useful if it pans out.

.

Future Tech! Three Dimensional Printers...!




Future Tech! 3D Printing...!

 

3D printing used to construct houses and buildings!

    



Changing the Automotive Industry



Human Civilization is entering the newest phase of our technological evolution where our computer technology completely transforms the way think about the production process of the goods we buy.  Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which uses Three-dimensional printing to create the actual item and can be used to create a potentially unlimited variety of items in the future. It may have as profound of an impact on the world as the creation of factories and assembly lines did during the industrial revolution in creating a mass production of goods and changing society in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time.

             The 3D printer works like this. First you upload the blueprint for the product you wish to make, (iPod, computer parts, car parts, even highly technical objects such as a Stradivarius violin!) pulling up a 3 dimensional version of it on your computer screen you can adjust the settings such as its shape, color, etc. Then boom! Press print. The 3D printer builds up the object gradually by depositing material from a nozzle making a thin layer of plastic or metal dust using tiny drops of glue or a tightly focused beam. Products are built up by progressively, adding material one layer at a time. Eventually your item solidifies and is ejected!

Seriously! A Violin, that plays just as well as the real thing!

          The obvious benefits of this technology are that manufacturing no longer needs to happen in a factory, the costs of production will drop off, and efficiency will increase greatly. Small items can be made by in a an office or shop while larger items such as bike frames, metal parts for transportation vehicles, even construction materials to build houses and  buildings, need a larger machine and more space.

             At the moment the 3D printing process is possible only with certain materials such as plastics, certain resins and metals but it is spreading fast as that drives the technology to improve and costs fall. A basic 3D printer, also known as a fabricator or “fabber”, now costs less than a laser printer did in 1985. And what’s Amazing is if you buy a “fabber” you can actually print the parts to build another 3D fabricator so you can give them to friends and print backup and replacement parts!
             3D Fabricators also will reduce waste enormously, requiring as little as one-tenth of the amount of material.(Imagine how much that adds up to when doing a job like building a house or large building, where there is sometimes hundreds of tons of waste.) It allows the creation of parts in shapes that conventional techniques cannot achieve, resulting in new, much more efficient designs for example in the area of aircraft wings or heat exchangers.3D printing will also promote innovation. If you can design a shape on a computer, you can turn it into an object. You can print a dozen, see if there is a market for them, and print 50 more if there is, modifying the design using immediate feedback from product users. This should be a boost for inventors and start-up companies because trying out new products will become less risky and costly.

The 3D printer, The Fabricator

        This new “Job-less” technological change is so profound that it will reset the economics of manufacturing. Think if every village has a fabricator that can produce items when needed how that will change how we do business. The technology will have implications not just for the distribution of money and jobs, but also for how we define someone’s intellectual-property. When the blueprints for a new video game, designer clothes, or any other creations are uploaded onto the internet how do we define the intellectual owner? (IP)

Nobody can fully predict the impact of this new technology but it seems that the long-term impact that 3D printing will bring will be a positive one. But one thing is clear, the technology is here, and it’s likely to influence every single area of industry it touches. It at the very least is forcing CEO, entrepreneurs, and inventors to start thinking about it now and with that 3D printing will most certainly expand the realms of innovation and imagination.

Household items including a Wrench!

Paradigm Shift!

       There’s a tectonic mindshift going on in the science of economics right now, but you probably wouldn't guess listening to economic professors, pundits, and politicians. Our whole Economic system is based on the idea that we live on a Planet with infinite resources. Oil reserves have dwindled and are likely even lower than we had been led to believe. Climate tipping points loom, melting glaciers, eroding coral reefs, and yet today’s economists argue incessantly about how economic growth can be sustained forever on a finite planet. 

      It's a similar situation as the one five hundred years ago when astronomers following Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe were tearing their hair out trying to make sense of all their calculations of the sun, moon and stars moving around above us in the night sky. It was only when Copernicus pointed out that we are not the center of the universe – the sun does not revolve around the Earth but rather the other way around – that all their convoluted calculations fell magically into place.

Today something eerily similar is happening in the science of economics: Economists and lay people alike are realizing that our human money economy is a subset of the Earth’s larger bioeconomy rather than the other way around. Over the next few years, as this monumental shift of perspective kicks in, all the economic, ecological and financial craziness of the industrial era will evaporate, and a new sustainable way of running our planetary household will have to magically fall into place.                                           Here's how that system will look.

The Venus Project, Redisigning The Future!

The Venus Project culminates the life long work of industrial designer, social systems engineer, and inventor Jacque Fresco, now age 95 (as of 2011).

The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture. There are many people today who are concerned with the serious problems that face our modern society: unemployment, violent crime, replacement of humans by technology, over-population and a decline in the Earth’s ecosystems.

As you will see, The Venus Project is dedicated to confronting all of these problems by actively engaging in the research, development, and application of workable solutions. Through the use of innovative approaches to social awareness, educational incentives, and the consistent application of the best that science and technology can offer directly to the social system, The Venus Project offers a comprehensive plan for social reclamation in which human beings, technology, and nature will be able to coexist in a long-term, sustainable state of dynamic equilibrium.

Astronomers' Say 3 Times as Many Stars as Thought!

             Scientists have recently discovered that the number of stars in the universe had been seriously undercounted, and they estimated that there could be three times as many stars out there as had been thought. The counting, of cooler, dim dwarf stars in certain galaxies gives astronomers’  an understanding of how galaxies formed and grew over the eons.

The conundrum is that astronomers cannot actually count the dwarf stars, which have masses less than a third of that of our Sun, in galaxies outside the Milky Way. So instead, they counted the brighter Sun-like stars and assumed that there were about 100 unseen dwarfs for each larger Sun-like star, as is the case in the Milky Way.

Yet obviously not every galaxy looks like the Milky Way, with its spiraling pinwheel arms. Some are blobby and elliptical, and it was just an assumption that the distribution of stars in other shaped elliptical galaxies is the same as in the Milky Way.



MilkyWay



Astronomers are now taking an innovative approach to counting what they formerly could not see. Because the dwarfs are cooler, the fingerprint of certain colors they emit and absorb is different from that of larger stars. While they could not see individual stars, the astronomers could calculate the number of dwarfs required to produce the telltale color fingerprint they detected in the light coming from the whole galaxy.

They found that in eight elliptical galaxies, the ratio of dwarf stars to Sun-like stars was 1,000 or 2,000 to 1, rather than the 100 to 1 in the Milky Way. A typical elliptical galaxy, thought to consist of about 100 billion stars, would have one trillion or more stars. Ellipticals account for about a third of all galaxies, leading to the new estimate of at least three times as many stars over all.

Basically what this mean is that Astronomers have had to abandon this notion of using the Milky Way as a template for the rest of the universe.  Also if the findings are correct, an undercount of dwarfs would mean astronomers have underestimated the masses of galaxies, and that could mean that galaxies developed much earlier and faster than currently thought. I think it’s pretty interesting and important when papers like this are published, and it reminds us how much we need to continue working to expand our knowledge of the universe.

New Plans for Solar Thermal in California

This past year represented a "sea change" as regulators ended a 20-year dry spell and fast-tracked solar-thermal plant approval helping drive the state's and nation's broader renewable-energy goals.

Developers were rushing to meet a December 31 deadline for federal incentives but Congress surprisingly extended that deadline for federal funding by another year.

The California Energy Commission approved nine solar-thermal plants, which are solar plants that concentrate heat before converting it into electricity. More commonplace photovoltaic plants typically use panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity.

Before 2010, government regulators had yet to approve any of the projects to build solar-thermal plant in California since a series of plants known as the Solar Energy Generating Systems, built mostly in the 1980’s. There are currently two solar-thermal projects under review. The 250-megawatt plants would eventually power at least 75,000 homes but environmental scientists need to conduct a two-year study of the rare Mohave Ground Squirrel at the site before proceeding with its application.

The second is under development by the city of Palmdale, north of Los Angeles. It would combine natural gas-fired turbine technology with solar technology, eventually generating 570 megawatts of power. Developers of many of the nine plants approved in 2010 haven't yet started construction as they wait to firm up environmental issues and financing.

The Futuristic San Francisco!

            San Francisco is already one of the greenest cities in the US, but check out this wild new concept from IwamotoScott Architects to completely remake the city into an ecotopia in the near future (They say 2108, but if we as a society get our proverbial “shit” together, I believe we could easily make this a reality by somewhere closer to 2050!)

            The design, which is as visually stunning as it is thought-provoking, recently won the History Channel’s City of the Future competition. It’s a full-scale urban system that combines the most innovative green technologies with San Francisco’s unique microclimate and geologic conditions, to produce a compelling vision for the future. Hydro-Net, as the project is known, will bring the lovely city-by-the-bay squarely into the 22nd Century with algae-harvesting towers, geothermal energy ‘mushrooms’, and fog catchers which distill fresh water from San Francisco’s infamous fog.

            San Francisco’s Hydro-Net is perhaps the most remarkable, modern and futuristic concept ever envisioned for the City. And considering the hunt for alternative energy sources in the coming century, it’s extremely important! It is an extensive network of above ground and underground systems that fulfill infrastructural needs for the movement of people, water, hover-cars, and energy throughout the city. This network would connect water, power collection, and distribution systems across the city, forming one giant super-system.

           The hydrogen would in turn be used as fuel to run hover-cars in the underground tunnels. The network also includes fog catchers that harvest air moisture, ecotowers, and more. Sound crazy? Designers Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott, the partners of San Francisco-based design firm IwamotoScott, don’t think so, and frankly neither do I. The concept recently won the $10,000 grand prize for their entry in the City of the Future competition, organized by the History Channel.

     -Jean Claude

S510 "The Food Saftety" Act, DANGEROUS.

S 510 fails on moral, social, economic, political, constitutional, and human survival grounds.

 This is what's scary about s510 

1. It puts all US food and all US farms under Homeland Security and the Department of Defense, in the event of contamination or an ill-defined emergency. It resembles the Kissinger Plan.

 

2. It would end US sovereignty over its own food supply by insisting on compliance with the WTO, thus threatening national security. It would end the Uruguay Round Agreement Act of 1994, which put US sovereignty and US law under perfect protection. Instead, S 510 says:

 

COMPLIANCE WITH INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS.

 

Nothing in this Act (or an amendment made by this Act) shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party.

 

3. It would allow the government, under Maritime Law, to define the introduction of any food into commerce (even direct sales between individuals) as smuggling into "the United States." Since under that law, the US is a corporate entity and not a location, "entry of food into the US" covers food produced anywhere within the land mass of this country and "entering into" it by virtue of being produced.

 

4. It imposes Codex Alimentarius on the US, a global system of control over food. It allows the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and the WTO to take control of every food on earth and remove access to natural food supplements. Its bizarre history and its expected impact in limiting access to adequate nutrition (while mandating GM food, GM animals, pesticides, hormones, irradiation of food, etc.) threatens all safe and organic food and health itself, since the world knows now it needs vitamins to survive, not just to treat illnesses.

 

5. It would remove the right to clean, store and thus own seed in the US, putting control of seeds in the hands of Monsanto and other multinationals, threatening US security. See Seeds ­ How to criminalize them, for more details.

 

6. It includes NAIS, an animal traceability program that threatens all small farmers and ranchers raising animals. The UN is participating through the WHO, FAO, WTO, and World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) in allowing mass slaughter of even heritage breeds of animals and without proof of disease. Biodiversity in farm animals is being wiped out to substitute genetically engineered animals on which corporations hold patents. Animal diseases can be falsely declared. S 510 includes the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), despite its corrupt involvement in the H1N1 scandal, which is now said to have been concocted by the corporations.

 

7. It extends a failed and destructive HACCP to all food, thus threatening to do to all local food production and farming what HACCP did to meat production ­ put it in corporate hands and worsen food safety.

 

8. It deconstructs what is left of the American economy. It takes agriculture and food, which are the cornerstone of all economies, out of the hands of the citizenry, and puts them under the total control of multinational corporations influencing the UN, WHO, FAO and WTO, with HHS, and CDC, acting as agents, with Homeland Security as the enforcer. The chance to rebuild the economy based on farming, ranching, gardens, food production, natural health, and all the jobs, tools and connected occupations would be eliminated.

 

9. It would allow the government to mandate antibiotics, hormones, slaughterhouse waste, pesticides and GMOs. This would industrialize every farm in the US, eliminate local organic farming, greatly increase global warming from increased use of oil- based products and long-distance delivery of foods, and make food even more unsafe. The five items listed the Five Pillars of Food Safety are precisely the items in the food supply which are the primary source of its danger.

 

10. It uses food crimes as the entry into police state power and control. The bill postpones defining all the regulations to be imposed; postpones defining crimes to be punished, postpones defining penalties to be applied. It removes fundamental constitutional protections from all citizens in the country, making them subject to a corporate tribunal with unlimited power and penalties, and without judicial review.

 

For further information, watch these videos

 

Food Laws ­ Forcing people to globalize?

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PwqUQ_HIlg&feature=related Corporate Rule? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXoJHG-er7A&feature=related Reclaiming Economies?

TOXIC TAP WATER

Dr. Paul Connett, Professor of Chemistry at St. Lawrence University in New York, gives a damning interview on the history of water fluoridation, the involvement of major industries to put certified toxic waste into our drinking water, and why government health authorities refuse to conduct scientific studies into the dangers of fluoridation. After watching this video I will never look at tap water the same way again.

Connett describes how he initially thought people who opposed fluoridation were “a bunch of whackos,” before conducting his own research which found that sodium fluoride was a toxic substance that contributed to a wide array of health defects. Heavy industry is barred from dumping this toxic waste into the sea by international law, but being able to sell it enables them to remove its hazardous characteristic and it becomes a product, explains Connett, polluting not only our water supply but also toothpaste and thousands of different foods.

Connett provides a detail run down of the many health problems caused by fluoride consumption, including dental fluorosis, which the Centers For Disease Control just recently announced was a problem for 41 per cent of children aged 12-15 in the United States, clearly indicating that children are being over-exposed to fluoride and that this is affecting other tissues and organs in the body, including bone disorders, a problem also wreaking havoc amongst adults in the United States as one in three now suffer from arthritis, which again is being caused by a build-up of toxic fluoride in the body. Connett also points to fluoride’s connection with thyroid disorders.

There have now been over 100 studies involving animals which show that fluoride damages the brain, stresses Connett, which is a particular concern for newborn babies who are susceptible to fluoride build up because of their weak blood-brain barrier. Connett cites numerous studies which prove a link between moderate exposure to fluoride and lowered IQ in children. Another important fact is that when studying the dental health of people in fluoridated areas and non-fluoridated areas, research shows that there are no health benefits at all that can be achieved through fluoridating the water supply.

In my opinion Fluoride’s most detrimental impact is on the pineal gland, which is a piece of brain tissue that sits in-between the two hemispheres of the brain. The reason it’s so important is because fluoride attracts to our pineal gland like a magnet! Researchers have found through animal studies that fluoride lowers the ability of the pineal gland to produce the hormone melatonin. The pineal gland has also been described as our spiritual third eye so the calcification of this gland can have dramatic effects on our ability to acess higher levels of consciousness. 

        Connett shows how out of control health authorities in the United States have become, putting out studies that claim vaccines containing mercury is perfectly safe for babies’ brains, while regulating mercury emissions in every other field because it is highly toxic. They have taken a similar approach in the fluoride debate, issuing studies that claim sodium fluoride, a toxic waste which has been heavily regulated in the industrial world for decades, has many beneficial health advantages when ingested into the human body. This is fostering widespread distrust in government health agencies because scientists involved with them are overseeing a “sickening” cover-up of the fluoride issue, states Connett.

The case against fluoride demolishes the notion that fluoride has any rightful place in our public water supply!

From I-pad to I-thought.

Will Mac’s next computer be the Thought-Pad?

A new study, funded by the NIH and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, involved subjects having their brains hooked up to a computer displaying two images, and through thought-control, the subjects were able to make the computer display one image and discard the other.

This study was composed of 12 participants with epilepsy who had wires implanted in their brains to search for the areas causing a seizure. Wires were inserted in the medial temporal lobe, which is responsible for memory and the ability to recognize faces. Connected to a computer, each subject was shown two pictures on a computer screen and told to choose one and focus their thoughts on until it was the only one visible. Subjects had a 70 percent rate of success in forcing one image to show exclusively.

Brain-computer interfaces, or BCIs, allow people to control computers with their thoughts. They offer real hope for people with prosthetic limbs or suffering from paralysis. In this study, however, the focus was more on understanding the brain’s thought and decision making processes instead of performing tasks, such as controlling a cursor, as in previous BCI studies. Interestingly, signals from only a handful of cells were needed to cause the change to one image.

As Dr. Babcock, M.D., Ph. D. and program director at NINDS said, "The remarkable aspects of this study are that we can concentrate our attention to make a choice by modulating so few brain cells and that we can learn to control those cells very quickly.” This is astounding, especially considering that visual comprehension, memories, information, and decision-making are all involved in a choice like the one in this study.

Google Investing Millions on Human Powered Monorail System.

Google's Investment for the Future "Google Motion"

Two years ago, the search engine giant, Google Inc., made headlines by announcing Project 10^100: a global call for ideas that would change the world by helping as many people as possible. Over 150,000 ideas were submitted, and "drive innovation in public transportation" was voted one of the five winning concepts.

In response, Google searched high and low for a company that had the most forward looking vision for the transportation industry, as well as the expertise to bring their futuristic ideas to life.

What they found was Shweeb: a space-age transportation device that combines the unique properties of monorail with recumbent cycle technologies. Shweeb get its root from the German word “schweben,” meaning to “float” or “suspend.”

So now the internet giant, Google Inc. is laying the groundwork for something totally new to offer the world. They recently came out with the demonstration of its driverless car, which uses artificial intelligence to run the machine. The car which sailed from its office at Mountain View campus to Santa Monica office and on to Hollywood Boulevard, making the total journey of this wonder car of about 140,000 miles, making this first of its sort experiment

In total Google demonstrated a group of seven cars which cover almost 1000 miles without human intervention. The robotic cars that were used in the trial run were the hybrid versions of Toyota Prius, and one Audi TT. This next generation car is fitted with almost all the major scientific gadgets like video cameras, radar sensors, a laser range finder, and detailed maps which are used to navigate the road ahead.

Google Inc. had taken the services of the major engineers from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), who has worked their best for the development of this marvelous machine. Effective care has been taken on the safety mechanisms. The driver's seat is not left vacant, and a trained software operator is seated in the car to monitor the software programming.

The makers of the car are claiming it to be the future wonder in the automobile sector. As this machine would make the journey time more pleasant and will also result in lowering the accidental rates. Though, today the project is in infancy but holds lots of promises for the future and if the advancement in the Artificial Intelligence is properly harnessed, this is likely to be what the future transportation will look like.

GreenTech; Boosting Solar Energy

GreenTech; Boosting Solar Panel Energy Efficiency

"I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait till oil and coal run out before we tackle that." - Thomas Edison

As Green Technology expands, the consumption of solar energy has gained rapid momentum. Solar energy is the most abundant source of energy however its efficiency, while improving, is not quite amazing yet. But with upcoming inventions, tremendous effort is being put to increase efficiency. The biggest advantage of solar panels is that it is pollution free. The normal solar panel efficiency can easily be used for running various devices at home, while high efficiency panels are used to run industrial machines consuming high energy.

 The latest technologies are applied to increase the energy output and efficiency of the solar panels. Thin film solar cells coated with light absorbing materials have recently been put into use to increase solar panel efficiency to about 40%. Silicon wafer cells are the most widely used solar panels and have a high efficiency.

SiOnyx Solar Panel with Black Silicon Cells

 Modern technologies like magnetic solar modules, the advent of nanotechnology and nano particles can potentially boost efficiency up to 80%. The solar cells are made up of nano particles, which are capable of actually harnessing the infrared radiation from the sun in abundance, even at night! These are not only highly efficient but are also cost effective.

Harvard University spinoff company, SiOnyx, makes black silicon. They have recently commercialized a semiconductor technology with the potential to improve solar-cell efficiency and light sensors in digital cameras. 
    The Beverly, Mass based company announced their collaboration with laser manufacturer Coherent and Vulcan Capital, the investment firm started by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The idea behind commercializing its "black silicon" technology in consumer electronics and solar-cell manufacturing comes from the increase of surface area once the silicon has been sprayed.

This semiconductor process blast silicon with a series of laser pulses in a controlled gas environment. The effect is to re-form the crystalline structure of silicon so that the surface captures more light.

CEO of SiOnyx, Stephen Saylor said, "It makes it almost a totally antireflective surface. Almost no light bounces off the stuff, so it's a very efficient way to capture more light in a layer of silicon."  

Other companies have techniques to improve the efficiency of solar cells and bring down the manufacturing costs. Silicon Valley-based Innovalight, for example, has signed deals with solar manufacturers to use its "silicon ink" technology which treats silicon material so that it produces more electricity.

Technology developed at IBM's research labs is inching closer to producing affordable commercial solar panels. Japanese manufacturer Solar Frontier said it has signed a deal to develop thin-film solar cells originally designed by IBM. With changes to the manufacturing process that incorporate its technology, solar-cell efficiency can improve by a few percentages.

One of the challenges for getting SiOnyx's black silicon technology into production is the cost of changing solar manufacturing equipment, but most companies have figured out that even a small efficiency improvement can be financially very significant.

IBM researchers last year showed they were able to improve the efficiency of solar cells made from a combination of copper, zinc, tin, sulfur and selenium,(CZTS) hitting an efficiency mark of 9.6 percent in the lab. Although they are generally less efficient than silicon, thin-film solar cells promise to be cheaper because less material is needed.

"We are interested in exploring CZTS for its evolutionary compatibility with our CIS thin film technology. The goals of the project correspond with Solar Frontier's mission to combine both economical and ecological solar energy solutions," Satoru Kuriyagawa, Solar Frontier's chief technology officer, said in a statement.

"The history of the solar market is incremental improvements," says CEO Steven Saylor. "But these small efficiency increases are dramatic given the overall scale of the energy industry."
I hope this helped you to get some idea about solar panel efficiency. If you are able to convert any percentage of the energy it takes to run your house with solar power, try to equip yourself with the best solar panels available with maximum output.

-Jean Claude Audet III