Whoa, Nella!
That was a fantastic activity we had on dye sensitized
solar cells at the end of the first week. Who would have guessed that we would
be able to make a functioning solar cell in just one hour? Well, if you guessed
that about our group, you would actually be completely wrong. Pretty much everything
that we touched ended up not working. First of all, Bek deserted us from the
very beginning—sad :(.
Next, we pressed the paraffin film way too hard onto the photoactive area and
left it in the sun, which meant that it melted onto the dye and became
impossible to remove. After mutilating about half the photoactive area, we just
gave up and left the paraffin covering the dye. At least some sunlight would
still be able to penetrate. After that, we poured the electrolyte on the slide
and then somehow managed to put the counter electrode on the wrong way. A solar
cell doesn’t do much good when all the sunlight is reflected. Luckily, we were
able to fix that without too much difficulty, but then we were faced with the
nearly impossible task of wiring up a simple series circuit. That blasted
potentiometer had three different leads, there were two multimeters that we
were somehow supposed to use, and enough wire for the whole city of Addis
Ababa, and we had to figure out how to get everything connected. Eventually, we
succeeded. We were very proud of ourselves.
But this isn’t the end of the
story. By now, we were the last group still working on this—everyone else had
finished long ago. We quickly took about 10 data points and felt like we
finally had everything we needed to complete the project, until we realized
that the multimeter had been broken all along. The second digit could be
interpreted as either 0, 7, 8, or 9—and we only considered zero until the very
end. Whoops. But the next groups were already lined up to start working on
their solar cells, so we had no choice but to leave. Ben decided to leave
altogether—he disappeared and didn’t come back until later that night. So Bek
deserted us from the beginning, but Ben deserted us at the end, after contributing
to this epic failure. Luckily, we had Celline, Nancy, and Dereje to save the
day. They realized that our data was mostly useless, so we sneakily borrowed
some beautiful data taken by another group, plotted a flawless I-V curve, and
earned high praise from Professor Tom Mallouk. Hurray us!
Moral of the story: Even when everything is going wrong, you can still have fun and learn a lot by collaborating with your fellow scientists. Life lesson learned!
Celline, Bek, Nancy, Ben, Dereje
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