| Description |
Global energy requirements will only increase with time. While fossil fuels can be relied upon for several more centuries, they would produce vast amounts of carbonaceous byproducts. This undesirable fact makes renewable options like bio-solar cells, which are clean, inexpensive, and take advantage of abundant solar energy, a tempting prospect. However, bio-solar cells often have very short lifetimes due to reactive oxygen products that build up during photosynthesis. Past research using the oxygen scavenger catalase to reduce the quantity of these oxygen byproducts has had advantageous effects on bio-solar cell lifetimes, leading to interest in other types of oxygen scavengers. Two of these, ascorbic acid and activated carbon, were tested to compare their abilities at extending solar cell lifetimes with those of catalase. Amperometric and solar cell tests reveal that low concentrations of ascorbic acid are the most effective methods of extending bio-solar lifetime tested in this study, increasing the lifetime of bio-anodes to 148% of the lifetime of blank bio-anodes as compared to the 110% increase achieved by catalase. Additionally, it was determined that ascorbic acid bio-anodes produce high photocurrents with less uncertainty than either catalase or activated carbon conditions. |
