Only a small part of the sun's energy is converted to electricity. This century will be looked at in history as the one that fulfilled the needs of humankind regarding clean energy.
A research team at the University of Georgia at the College of Engineering is studying the use of plants to figure out how to create electricity. Basically the researchers are using solar energy to get electricity from plants. Plants live on energy from the sun. The source of photosynthesis is solar and it is the basic concept behind photovoltaic or solar energy. Most plants are extremely efficient regarding absorbing sunlight and using it to create electrons. Researchers have suggested that this is the way that it works. For every photon of sunlight a plant is able to use, it creates one electron. Solar panels have an efficiency level of about twelve to seventeen percent. Studying how plants have a nearly perfect efficiency level will provide many answers regarding how to capture sunlight and turn it into electricity. This is the future of obtaining electricity from plants and the research is quite in depth.
When photosynthesis happens in plants, sunlight is needed to take water and split it into oxygen and hydrogen. Electrons are produced and are the result of this process. A part of the plant takes the electrons and creates sugar that plants use as nutrition in order to grow and reproduce. These scientists from the University of Georgia have found a way to capture the electrons before they become part of the process of becoming sugar. Since electrons are the basis of creating an electrical current, this becomes extremely important regarding plants creating electricity.
In order to get electricity from plants, a method involved regarding the obtaining of the part of the plant called thylakoids which are the structures that take and store energy from sunlight must be put in place. They change the protein in these structures in order to stop the pathway on which electrons move. The researchers then created what they are now calling a nanotube which is a cylindrical structure that is 50,000 times thinner than an average human hair.
Thirty years ago scientists were first experimenting with hydrogen cells. Now it is being used in modern mechanisms as a form of powerful form of energy. Getting electricity from plants is as promising as hydrogen fuel was many years ago. The objective is to capture increased energy from the sun and the newly discovered nanotube that can be used to get electricity from plants. All of this research will contribute to perfecting solar energy.
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