A Novel Solar Cell Ionotronic Energy Pathway Inspired by an Electric Eel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Solar cell technology can be one of the best choices for sustainable future energy. Solar energy conversion strategies inspired by nature can play a vital role in solving the significant challenges in solar cell products such as low power conversion efficiency, expensive fabrication process, and materials. In this thesis, we introduce for the first time a solar cell with unique ionotronic technology inspired by an electric eel with a completely novel configuration of hydrogels. This new generation of solar cells utilizes an ionotronic gradient energy pathway which can greatly enhance the efficiency of solar energy collection using mobile ions. This new solar cell is made of a heterogeneous multi-layer hydrogel that mimics the artificial electric eel with the ability to produce relatively large voltage under external stimulation. Device physics, design, fabrication, and optoelectronic characterization of hydrogel solar cell devices are provided in this thesis. \nAn artificial electrocyte was designed by using polyacrylamide hydrogel synthesized with four different components. The fabricated artificial electrocyte showed 150-180 mV for one cell containing high salinity, cation-selective, low salinity, anion-selective, and high salinity hydrogels. Seven series of these tetrameric gel cells showed 1.27 mV and 2.87 µA by the electromotive force of ionic gradient between low salinity and high salinity gels. By stacking three series gel cells in parallel, about 7 µA is reported. It is shown that the thickness of the gels has a proportional relationship with the resistance of the gels. UV-Vis spectroscopy results show that the high salinity gel is able to absorb light by a maximum peak at 534 nm for 1.5 mm of thickness. The photoconductivity tests prove the designed electric eel-inspired solar cell is able to generate photocurrent. By merging the artificial electrocyte ionic energy pathway and the principles of solar energy converter, the bio-inspired eel solar cell shows 5.08 % power conversion efficiency using three layers of low salinity/high salinity/low salinity hydrogels. The current density of 6.475 mA/cm2 is obtained for cation-selective/high salinity/anion-selective hydrogel-based solar cell. \n For the first time, in this project, not only new materials with exceptional properties have been introduced to the photovoltaic solar systems, but also a novel flexible, eco-friendly solar cell with a unique configuration has been proposed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".