Yes , a Blu - beam copy of Police Story 3 : Supercop was destroyed for the saki of science . It turns out that the nanostructure of Blu - ray disc makes them especially well - suited to soaking up light — precisely what you ’d want with a solar panel .
A radical of research worker at Northwestern managed to make more efficient solar panel base off of the radiation pattern on Blu - ray of light disc . They begin by cutting off the edges a Blu - shaft of light copy of the 1992 Jackie Chan flick Police Story 3 and opening up the saucer . ( It ’s actuallynot a bad movie , especially for those of you into Hong Kong capers . ) The researchers were after the quasi - random nanostructure that encode the datum on the phonograph recording . IEEE Spectrum explainswhy the agency data is lay in on Blu - ray makes it relevant to solar board , specially equate to other DVD .
The binary data on a full Blu - ray disc , on the other mitt , has a nanostructure that ’s very different . It consist of compressed binary sequences that have been applied with an fault control modulation , so that all those segments of ones and zeros ( physically translated into island and cavity on the surface of the disc ) are always between two and seven digits long . Since the distance of a unmarried digit is 75 micromillimetre , a full disc ends up being etched with a quasi - random pattern of island and pits ranging in length from 150 nm to 525 nm . These dimension happen to be “ near optimum ” for trapping photons in the visible and near infrared dowery of the spectrum .
The researchers then used the open face of the Blu - re disc to make a mold that was stamped over solar panels , give the panel the same nanostructure pattern as the original disc . The Blu - ray - patterned solar panel end up being 12 per centum more efficient than smooth ones . Blu - ray discs may be riding the train to obsolescence , but certain aspects of its technology can still be repurposed for novel use . [ Nature Communications , IEEE Spectrum ]
Top epitome : Alina Cardiae Photography / Shutterstock
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