Solar power sings 'I love rock 'n' roll,' study finds
Pop and rock music boosted the efficiency of solar cells used to produce electricity by 40 percent, according to a study by scientists in London. Rock on, solar power.
Solar cells are installed on a flat roof of a storage facility in Decatur, Ga. Scientists in London have found that playing high pitched sounds, often found in pop and rock songs, increases the performance of solar cells.
David Tulis/AP/File
A group of scientists from the Queen Mary University of London and the Imperial College London have made quite an amazing discovery: solar cells like pop and rock music, but they鈥檙e not too keen on classical.
Obviously I am not talking about actual conscious preferences, but rather that by playing high pitched sounds, often found in pop and rock songs, the聽
In their experiments the researchers grew tiny zinc oxide nanorods and then covered them with an active polymer that created a photovoltaic device to turn the suns light into electricity. The high frequencies and pitches in the songs played caused vibrations in the nanorods which increased the聽
Zinc oxide is a聽, meaning that when a pressure or strain is applied it produces voltage. These experiments were designed to test the effect that this piezoelectric phenomena would have on solar cells. The results were very unexpected.聽(Related article:聽)听
Dr. Steve Dunn, from the Queen Mary鈥檚 School of Engineering and Materials Science, said that聽鈥渁fter investigating systems for converting vibrations into electricity this is a really exciting development that shows a similar set of physical properties can also enhance the performance of a photovoltaic.鈥�
James Durrant, the Professor of Photochemistry at Imperial College London,聽聽that they had聽鈥渢hought the sound waves, which produce random fluctuations, would cancel each other out and so didn't expect to see any significant overall effect on the power output.
The key for us was that not only that the random fluctuations from the sound didn't cancel each other out, but also that some frequencies of sound seemed really to amplify the solar cell output - so that the increase in power was a remarkably big effect considering how little sound energy we put in.
We tried playing music instead of dull flat sounds, as this helped us explore the effect of different pitches. The biggest difference we found was when we played pop music rather than classical, which we now realize is because our acoustic solar cells respond best to the higher pitched sounds present in pop music.鈥�
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