Its been almost a year since the Star Battery was announced to the public, very little has been said since then, until now.
According to Yury Zaitsev, an expert with the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Star Battery will dramatically change the way energy is both harnessed and stored. Yury says that the same material which generates almost 50% efficiency, can also be made into a ultracapacitor with nine hundred times the storage capacity of a car battery. These developments are made possibly, because of a process where gold nano-particles are imbedded into silicon, vastly improving their performance compared to tradition solar cells.
"The simplest way to convert solar radiation
into electricity is by using the so-called extrinsic photo effect,
whereby particles of light "knock out" electrons from a screen put up
in their path. Soviet scientists from the Leningrad Physical and
Technical Institute were the first to produce an electric current in
that fashion in the 1930s. True, the efficiency of the first solar
sulfur-helium elements was barely 1%. But starting in 1958, silicon
solar batteries became the main source of electric power on spacecraft.
By the mid-1970s, their efficiency approached 10%, where it remained
for nearly two decades. It was only in the mid-1990s that it went up to
15%, and, by the turn of the new century, it had reached 20%.
This
was achieved mainly by improving the technique for producing pure
silicon - the basic material for making solar cells - from quartzites.
The largest deposits of very pure quartzites are found in Russia, which
had vast reserves of them. Recently the Joint Institute for Nuclear
Research in Dubna, near Moscow, developed a photo cell with an
efficiency of almost 50%. Scientists describe their product as a "star
battery." It is an example of how nanotechnology can improve the
workings of well-known processes."
As we can see nanotechnology is opening many doors to energy exploration both here on Earth and beyond.
http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20070803/70324027.html