The unexpected use scientists found for 16th-century marbles
Lead balls created centuries ago may one day help power your home. If that happens, we can thank a team of scientists who found the toxic lead waste, including musket balls dating back to the 16th century.th and 17th centuries, can be used as a key ingredient in the development of solar panels.
As reported by Gizmodo, based on a study published in Cell Reports Physical Scienceresearchers at Germany’s Jülich Research Center have come up with a way to upgrade contaminated lead to convert it into high-purity lead iodide, a compound essential to perovskite solar cells, best known as the leading candidate for the future of solar cell technology, possibly one day replacing traditional silicon panels while offering lower production costs and higher efficiency.
The problem with creating these types of solar cells is that they rely heavily on lead, an element that is toxic to us and the environment, as well as a pain to extract and refine. But what if we didn’t have to mine it so much? There are already tons of lead sitting unused in global waste repositories. The researchers aren’t proposing anything revolutionary, but it would still be impactful: What if we used all the lead that’s just sitting around poisoning the world to power our high-tech solar panels?
Even the oldest, roughest lead balls can be turned into solar panels
Recycled lead, no matter how old and dirty, is reshaped into electrodes and placed in a chemical solution. An electric current then drives a reaction that produces highly purified lead iodide. The materials are then used to grow perovskite crystals.
The result is a solar cell with about 21 percent efficiency, not far from the roughly 27 percent achieved by the best lab-grown perovskites using expensive high-end materials. And all with what essentially amounts to a lot of discarded junk, some of it bullets specifically designed to kill people, which are now being converted into energy.
The researchers’ experiment used highly degraded musket balls to prove that their method could work with lead in any condition, even when it is old and highly oxidized. The idea is that if it worked in this scenario, it could almost certainly work with more common industrial lead waste, of which there is a lot out there.
