Question: How long does it take to grow glass from the zinc oxide, and would this create enough energy to be of any significence?

Kieren Bradley answered on 9 Mar 2014:

I think maybe I haven’t described my materials well enough; the glass is made by a company called Pilkingtons, and is electrically conductive, a bit like the glass you get in iPhones and TV screens. The zinc oxide is then grown on top. The method is that I drop 20 droplets of zinc acetate onto the glass, I usually do about 10 samples at a time so it can take about 2 hours. I then place it into an oven for 5 hours, and then grow the rods in a chemical bath for 1 to 4 hours depending on how long I want them. It then has to go back in the oven for 5 hours. In all, if I start on a Monday I’ll have them finished by Wednesday (as I usually leave them in the oven overnight) compare this to lots of other chemical reactions and it is quite fast, but if I wanted to turn this into an industrial process it would have to be much quicker. The energy from these devices comes from the sun, and will actually be absorbed by materials coated onto the zinc oxide; the idea of the zinc oxide is that you replace some of the expensive material with a cheap material but without losing too much of the energy we are getting from the sun. The energy from solar cells is definitely needed if we want to stop using fossil fuels, so new cheap solar panels are certainly worth researching, but we also need to look into the wind power, tidal power and other sources of electricity so we can get electricity whatever the weather or daylight.