Friday, March 5, 2010

Lecture #27, Friday, March 5th

Today we discussed the theory of how a dye sensitized solar cell works, particularly the one we constructed in class using titanium dioxide. TiO2 by itself cannot conduct electricity and neither can the dye you chose. But if you combine them together and use a redox couple, we can make a Gratzel cell.

After discussing the theory of how our "Donut Solar Cells" operate, I went over the breakdown of the 250 points for the Solar Cell lab. They will be as follows:

25 pts: Relative Amount of TiO2 extracted from the donut

25 pts: Uniform thickness of TiO2 film deposited on conducting glass

100 pts: Rational explanation for choice of dye

100 pts: Final Report

If you want to get a head start on the final report, you will need to write up what you did, similar to a procedure, but it needs to be written in a scientific manner. I would first suggest writing out a step by step numerical procedure, then put everything in paragraph form.

I also briefly discussed an overview of the contents of a research paper and will start with that on Monday.

Next week we will conclude our alternate energy unit (and the class in general, which is so sad that we only have three lectures left :( by looking at nuclear chemistry. If you want to get ahead of the material, read the first part of 21.6 and all of sections 21.1 - 21.4.

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