Solar powered boats

Boat is important mode of transportation on water.Nonetheless, We also use it for tourism purposes to explore beautiful places,rivers and beaches. Project, we are going to discuss today is about 2-stroke engine boats we usually see on popular tourist destinations.2-stroke engines are most common form of engines used in boats but they are far more polluting than engines used in cars.With toxic fumes they spew, they are destroying our climate gradually. Moreover, this engine emits Sulfur di oxide gas which later react with oxygen found in water to produce sulfuric acid. Sulphuric Acid is harmful for the species inside the water as well as for surroundings.
In this post, we will see, how we can use solar energy in boat to replace these traditional fuel engines.Converting these engines to electric engine helps our environment and also help us to protect our resources.

Before we discuss any further, first we should look for other renewable energy sources we can use:
Wind Power :Though, It is a good option and has been used from long time back but we have two basic problems with wind powered small boat,First it requires lot of space inside the boat and second it is not very efficient.


Pedal : We can also consider using pedal boat but with pedal boat we can't travel long distances.

Hybrid(Electric + Diesel): This can be a great alternative but requires great amount of technical knowledge and processors to decide when to shift between electric to diesel and vice-versa.

Electric Boat : They solve many of the above mentioned problems and that's why we select this option, but it has problems of its own.First major problem with electric engines is their energy source itself which is  electricity.Water is good conductor and we should find a ways to make sure that electricity and water get separate always.

Things to consider:

Make your boat as lighter as you can: Remove all the unnecessary mass from the boat.

Powering for whole day of use: To make it attractive option, we need to power its engine with sufficient electricity for 24 x 7 travelling.To do so, we will require constant energy source which is solar energy and great energy storage unit which is our battery. To capture sunlight we requires solar cells which themselves have associated problems of weight and size. A medium size solar cell weights around 7 kg.So, if we use more solar cells, it will increase the mass which corresponds to more electricity consumption. To, somewhat solve this problem we can use tilting mechanism to capture more electricity from lesser cells..

Water proof batteries: When we travel on the water, their would be occasions when our batteries get wet, so it absolutely necessary to use water proof batteries.

Efficient motor: More efficient our motor, lesser the requirement of solar cells and  batteries.

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Nanowires new innovation in Solar Energy

In last post, we discussed about "carbon solar cell" which is manufactured using 100 % carbon(widely available and cheaper to use). In that post, we discussed about nanotechnology and how carbon changes its behaviour on nano scale .Today, we will see how we can use nanotechnology with gallium arsenide(better alternative to silicon in solar cell).

Gallium Arsenide:

Gallium arsenide (GaAs) is a compound of the elements gallium and arsenic. It is a III/V semiconductor, and is used in the manufacturing of solar cells since 1970, when it was first introduced by Zhores Alferov in the USSR.In the early 1980s, the efficiency of the best GaAs solar cells surpassed that of silicon solar cells.These cells has also being used in rovers Spirit and Opportunity, which are exploring Mars' surface.


Concept:
According to researcher Anna Fontcuberta i Morral,inspiration of  building solar cell with vertical nanowires came into her mind by observing trees.Trees captures their sunlight from all sides(360 degree) by standing perpendicular from the ground but in our traditional cells we are doing exactly opposite and using horizontal way of capturing light and that makes our cells less effecient.In her experiment she uses nano-wires which is a nanostructure, with the diameter of the order of a nanometer (10^-9 meters).Nanowires requires less material therefore less money( If we require 40 kg in traditional method, in nanotechnology we will need only 40 grams).Nanowires are filamentary crystals with a very high ratio of length to diameter, the latter being in the nanometer range. Semiconductor nanowires are of significant interest from a fundamental point of view as they exhibit new physical and chemical properties owing to their large surface-to-volume ratio, low dimensionality and confinement in one dimension.

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Carbon Solar Cells

Though, we have discussed a lot about solar energy projects, but solar energy is not economically viable for our daily use because of increasingly expensive materials used in traditional solar cells made up of silicon, which is not available in abundance and hence very costly. Today, we will discuss about carbon solar cells and how to use them to built complete carbon solar cells?


Why Carbon ?

"Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a low cost," said study senior author Zhenan Bao, a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford. According to Professor Bao, in the future we can use solar cells,which are coated on the surface of buildings, on windows or on cars to generate electricity

How is it possible?

When we take elements into their nano scale, their properties start to change and  it happens with carbon too.Carbon nanotubes have great electrical conductivity. Stanford researches found that, they can use nanotechnology to build new type of solar cells by just using carbon.It consists of mainly three parts,
Two Electrodes made up of Carbon Nano tubes(graphene – sheets of carbon that are one atom thick –and single-walled carbon nanotubes that are 10,000 times narrower than a human hair) instead of expensive ITO(Indium Tin Oxide) and one Active Layer made of buckyballs(soccer ball-shaped molecules with carbon atoms at each vertex just 1 nano-meter of diameter).

Buckyball(C60):

It is a spherical football shaped fullerene molecule.
Formula: C60.

Graphene:

It is a substance composed of pure carbon, with atoms arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern similar to graphite, but in a one-atom thick sheet.

Carbon nanotubes:

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure.

Problems:

Basic problem with carbon solar cells is their efficiency which is only 1 Percent in comparison to silicon cells with 20 Percent efficiency.People working with this technology beleives that they can increase these cells efficiency significantly by implementing some minute changes during its manufacturing.

Advantages:
Their are many advantage of using carbon cells such as

Stanford Page: Build the first all carbon solar cell



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