William,
I came across this today. I am going to look into it some more. The gentleman who invented the integrated circuit, Jack Kilby, had been working on a solar energy system that had great promise. I would love to know if anyone has picked up on his research. Here is the part of the article that discusses it:
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In the early 1970s Kilby left TI to work as an independent inventor. The holder of some 50 patents, his inventions include an electronic check writer and a paging system with "selectively actuable pocket printers." And while Kilby will always be known for his work on the integrated circuit, a lesser-known project he pursued for about seven years, but was forced to abandon, held similar promise. Kilby developed a solar energy system that used panels of spherical solar cells to obtain hydrogen from hydrogen bromide. The hydrogen was then fed into a fuel cell that produced electricity. The bromine was stored in a tank and later reunited with the hydrogen, so it could be reused.
The beauty of the design, says Kilby's friend, Skip Porter, the dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Oklahoma, was that rather than "store the energy in a battery, you stored it back in the chemical bonds between the hydrogen and bromine."
In 1983, despite the promise of the design and an investment of more than $25 million by the Department of Energy and millions more by TI, the company decided to stop the project, much to the chagrin of Kilby, who was overseeing a team of two dozen engineers. "He had great faith in the commercial feasibility of that product," says Clough. "He was really upset with TI for pulling the plug on it. But TI was going through tough times."
Kilby, ever the stoic, doesn't talk much about the solar cell project, saying only he was "disappointed" that TI halted funding. But Clough says the project would have been "a magnitude development like the integrated circuit. It would have really been a mammoth step forward." Had the work continued, he said, "we wouldn't be having problems like the energy problem in California."
zdnet.com |
