Difference between revisions of "Team:CLSB-UK/Description"
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Revision as of 23:06, 18 October 2016
We have decided to focus our effort on improving the efficiency of Biological Photovoltaic Cells, a next generation version of the Solar Panel, which harnesses photosynthetic organisms to convert solar energy into electrical energy. The modern silicon solar panel has many problems. It is expensive to make and bulky, and it has a low Shockley-Queisser limit of around 34%. Thus our project aims to apply a genetic engineering approach towards developing a next-gen solar panel with the use of bacteria within a microbial fuel cell. We take traditional microbial fuel cell (MFC) designs and modify them to create a biological photovoltaic cell (BPV). By using cyanobacteria in our BPV, we can extract the energy that has been harvested from light. This has the potential to be a future sustainable and eco-friendly practice for the production of renewable energy. However, a major pitfall of the use of the BPV as a form of bioelectricity generation is the fact that it has low efficiency and this was an obstacle that we aimed to overcome in our design.
