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  3. At the moment, there are two reliable ways to make electricity from sunlight.【F1】You can use a panel of solar cells to create th

At the moment, there are two reliable ways to make electricity from sunlight.【F1】You can use a panel of solar cells to create th

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问题 At the moment, there are two reliable ways to make electricity from sunlight.【F1】You can use a panel of solar cells to create the current directly, by liberating electrons from a semiconducting material such as silicon. Or you can concentrate the sun’s rays using mirrors, boil water with them, and employ the steam to drive a generator.
Both work. But both are expensive. Gang Chen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Zhifeng Ren of Boston College therefore propose, in a paper in Nature Materials, an alternative. They suggest that a phenomenon called the thermoelectric effect might be used instead—and they have built a prototype to show that the idea is practical.
In their view, three things are needed to create a workable solar-thermoelectric device. The first is to make sure that most of the sunlight which falls on it is absorbed, rather than being reflected. The second is to choose a thermoelectric material which conducts heat badly(so that different parts remain at different temperatures)but electricity well.【F2】The third is to be certain that the temperature gradient which that badly conducting material creates is not frittered away by poor design.
The two researchers overcame these challenges through clever engineering. The first they dealt with by coating the top of the device with oxides of hafnium, molybdenum and titanium, in layers about 100 nanometres thick.【F3】These layers acted like the anti-reflective coatings on spectacle lenses and caused almost all the sunlight falling on the device to be absorbed.
The second desideratum, of low thermal and high electrical conductivity, was achieved by dividing the bismuth telluride into pellets a few nanometres across.【F4】That does not affect their electrical conductivity, but nanoscale particles like this are known to scatter and obstruct the passage of heat through imperfectly understood quantum-mechanical processes.
The third objective, efficient design, involved sandwiching the nanostructured bismuth telluride between two copper plates and then enclosing the upper plate(the one coated with the light-absorbing oxides)and the bismuth telluride in a vacuum. The copper plates conducted heat rapidly to and from the bismuth telluride, thus maintaining the temperature difference. The vacuum stopped the apparatus losing heat by convection. The upshot was a device that converts 4.6% of incident sunlight into electricity.【F5】That is not great compared with the 20% and more achieved by a silicon-based solar cell, the 40% managed by a solar-thermal turbine, or even the 18-20% of one of the new generation of cheap and cheerful thin-film solar cells. But it is enough, Dr Chen reckons, for the process to be worth considering for mass production.
【F5】
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答案以硅晶为基础的太阳能电池的转化率为20％甚至以上，太阳能热力涡轮的为40％，就连一种新一代价廉物美的薄膜太阳能电池的转化率也能达到18％一20％。
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