WOW! COOL!, anyone need a hair cut? i could use some extra solar panels. :P

I really wouldn’t trust the Daily Heil on anything, least of all technical matters. I’ll remain sceptical for the moment. ;-)

Finally a good use for pubes!

I admit, it’s got me a bit suspicious, the Daily Mail is not one of the best papers in the UK; not as low as an outright tabloid, but nothing like The Guardian.

The paper that hackaday found supports the theory. Unfortunately, precedings.nature.com is a PRE-publication site, there are no comments, and only four votes for the paper, so it hasn’t been seriously reviewed.

After taking a gander at the source, this screams bologna to me. Just my two cents.

While melanin may have important applications in photochemistry, what these guys are doing is pretty fake. As someone has pointed out, the surface area of the hair is insufficient to produce the power output claimed – particularly as the background is black and will not reflect light back onto the hair.

Secondly, hair is a pretty darned good insulator. Try it with your multimeter if you don’t believe me. gotta call “bullshit” on this one.

very cool stuff, I also have some doubts but very cool if true

Sorry, I ment to say “Our crack team of hack readers…”

What’s the efficiency? 0%?
Fail

“our crack team of crack crackers”

Note in the artical that two dissimilar metals – copper and aluminum:

“We proceeded to test the photo electrochemical properties of melanin by
manufacturing a prototype cell (figure 2). We started with a very simple cell were
the electrolyte was a 1.3% solution of melanin in distilled water, cooper and
aluminum electrodes 2.5 cm apart, cooper wires (covered with silicon) where
attach to the electrodes by glued them down, we noticed that any kind of
welding affected the melanin’s behavior. The cell started to give up electricity
just a few minutes after being ensemble.
and that the output declined after a few hours”
– sounds more like a battery to me…

Possible, energy is max 1000w per sq meter, by looking at the pictures in the article, the hair is used to colour the back panel, the lumps and what seem to be hairs are the front connection wires and not collection devices…

Here is a publication about melanin contributing to photoelectric generation http://tinyurl.com/mkvcwz

This is a hoax and a very obvious one at that. I’m pretty disappointed at Hack A Day for letting this one through.

Gimme lots of hair (hair) photovoltaic hair! (hair)

Selling power back to the grid through the wonder of my
hair
hair
hair

-or not, as the case may be.

I’m looking for a power conditioner that doesn’t cause oily buildup like so many others do…

-something that leaves my photovotaic array feeling silky and manageable.

I’m not denying that organic solar cells work, or even that they might use melanin as the active dye, but there is also the fact that the panel shown looks to be about the same size as an 18W silicon panel (which is a pretty substantial size), even though “state of the art” organic cells are still far below silicon in efficiency. (there main point of interest is vastly cheaper manufacturing.) Organic melanin-based solar cells? Maybe. 18W from an amateur-constructed panel of the size shown? No way.

Now we just need a battery bank made out of tofu to make this practical…

I just wanted to comment on the “comment” about the surface area. I don’t know if you guys know but I did read an article where the researches ware using a “fuzzy” matterial that resulted in greater efficiency^2 … however I’d like to have a panel that didn’t need an haircut every few weeks, I forget to cut my already and I don’t need anther excuse for the home owner association to bug me with. “Sir would you please give your roof pannels a trim” …

… passer by “get your house a haircut hipie!”

lol strider_mt2k! You made me ROFL! :)

O.K. Here is a stupid question. Can anyone tell me why the ‘scope’ display in the pdf figure is showing an AC waveform? Shouldn’t the output from a ‘solar cell’ be DC.

Also, the LED has been lit for 10,000 hours? Thats over a year of contiuous operation – so they had this working a year ago and are now just publishing this paper.

If this is legit then it is very interesting. However, I have serious doubts after reading the paper.

I actually thought for a moment to see if it was April fool day – just a few months off.

Ops wrong article. Sorry
Should have been for http://hackaday.com/2009/09/10/tapping-tree-power/

no, no, no… nobody’s going to be homebrewing this. this will only matter if someone figures out they have to first invest in some cheap easy-to-set-up permanent infrastructure, so they can change out the very-mass-produced panels every month or whatever… and they have to arrive via a bunch of shipping just-in-time because nobody’s going to want to sit on them while they race toward expiry… or they have to be preservable while stored somehow at the very least… i need to know more about it before i can consider it even partially hopeful anywhere.

@ambigrid review: This student is making a solar *cell* not a solar panel. The student’s technology is based on cuprous oxide which provides about 0.25V at 50uA per 0.01 square meter. To generate 9V at 18W this student’s solar panel would need to be 120m x 120m square. I assume that you mean you assembled a solar panel from silicon cells, correct? If not silicon, what technology is used in the cells?

I used the Ambigrid Plans to build a solar pales for under $100, as well as a solar water heater for less than $10! I can’t say enough good things about them!

I used the Ambigrid Plans to build a solar pales for under $100, as well as a solar water heater for less than $10! I can’t say enough good things about them!

Max,
That’s a reasonable question, except that elsewhere on the web there’s video of the team lighting devices that would require more than 0.05W, and there’s a photo of 1 panel providing about 9VDC and, apparently, lighting a fluorescent light via an upconverter, and there are articles claiming the students built a panel (just one is mentioned) capable of charging a cellphone. Also, by my calculations, a panel or bank of panels built with this technology would require 14,400 square meters or a square 120 meters on a side. Furthermore, according to quotes in other articles, the teens say that the hair has to kept saturated with salt water to work. So that means, somebody would need to keep a huge bank of panels wet all day long, as I imagine they would dry out fast. Then, there’s the matter of the hair which, after all, is just protein decomposing in the wet environment. Maybe what you say is true or maybe somwthing was lost in the translation. The author of the Daily Mail piece says she just “saw the panel working”. She didn’t really examine it and, based on the article, doesn’t understand the science behind it at all. When somebody from a university sees it or they publish a paper/patent explaining their technology we’ll know for sure. Based on what’s been made public, it’s virtually certain that the students haven’t made a working solar panel from human hair.

I too figured BS but figured, hey why not test. Took five minutes to grab hair samples from the fam…running the gambit from blonde/grey to dark brown. Needless to say the voltages measured were inconsistent and very, very low: 6mV to -8mV, when exposed to a 23W CFL…much more than the 6V tube light in the Daily Mail article. FWIW, lighter colored hair (less melamine) registered voltage at longer lengths than darker hair (more melamine). I think this is am important observation seeing that the photo in the article shows dark hair and short segments between contacts.

So, why were my readings so low? First thought was meter sensitivity/accuracy. I think hack-a-day had a post on this not too long back from the dude that does the oscilloscope reviews. So, I grabbed my cheapo meter to compare and sure enough, I registered 50 to 90mV using it (interestly no negative voltages this time). Interestingly, the dark hair did consistently register higher than the lighter colored samples.

So, there may be something to this but I don’t have the equipment to test it correctly. I still doubt their results though based on the photos shown or of the ultimate practicality of it. The hair has to be wet? What about mineral content in the water or the hair itself? Is the hair cleaned before use? I can already hear the jokes about the village being downstream from the dump we send our e-waste to be “recycled”.

Thanks for this article.grate post Thanks for the detailed explanation! I built my own Solar Panels for under $200 that I am currently using to power my 1800SF home using the plans at:

I actually used the Ambigrid Plans to build a solar pales for under $100, as well as a solar water heater for less than $10! I can’t say enough good things about them!

WoW! now I thinking about should I call this technology “black energy” or even “blond energy” if you can use power source from Scarlet Johanson… lol

I have to admit this is a very creative twist on the meaning of “renewable energy”. I would like to see some actual numbers on output and reliability before I got too excited.

I think that true do it your self solar panels will be brought a step closer when solar panel manufacturers begin to integrate micro inverters into every panel. Doing so provides maximum power point tracking (MPPT) at each panel and eliminates string inverter design complexities.

This makes it much easier for weekend warriors to get their hands dirty and complete a large portion of the install themselves. Granted you still need a qualified electrician to connect you to the grid but you can save a good deal on labor with this approach. For more information check out this article:

http://www.ecodirect.com/DIY-Solar-Panels-s/250.htm

I actually used the new Ambigrid Plans to build solar panels for under $100, as well as a solar water heater for less than $10! I can’t say enough good things about them!

Good explanation of bad science!!!
http://sites.google.com/site/edwardcraighyatt/hairsolarpanelnepal

from this link above:http://sites.google.com/site/edwardcraighyatt/hairsolarpanelnepal

“”However, test results and analysis of quotes from the inventor show this invention to be a hoax.”"

this is posted al over the internet and results to be a fake. lol

Wow, this really is a hoax? Huh, it got me all excited about how it would actually work.. Haha. Weird though.. but anyways.. I suppose we can always just get one of those DIY solar kits and get cranking on our own solar cell power! (That’s what I’m doing, at least..)

Don’t bother reading any of the DIY solar panel articles that spammers post here. Instead, read this site that debunks their nonsense: http://www.nlcpr.com/Deceptions6.php

The debunking link describes how spammers actually get coached on posting innocent-looking stuff on blogs like “Wow! This is really a hoax! I am soooo disappointed. Guess I will have to build my own DIY solar panel!”. And of course there’s a link to the spammer’s website.

You can pretty much assume any post with “DIY solar” or “build your own solar panels” is a scam. Given economies of scale and other factors, you are better off getting commercial panels than getting mixed up with these bozos.