You know how that first cup of coffee gets your motor revved first thing in the morning?
If we’re understanding science correctly, it appears that coffee has a similar effect on solar cells. At first blush, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. According to researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles and a Chinese firm, it appears that perovskite solar cells jumped from 17% to over 20% greater efficiency through application of caffeine molecules.
This discovery could help this lower-cost pliable alternative technology compete with existing solar technology, reports technical journal Joule.
The publication reports that caffeine molecules were randomly picked in the process of trying many other kinds of molecules and turned out to work on the hunch that lone electron pairs in the oxygen atom might predispose caffeine as an energy enhancer. Read more.