Artificial leaf produces first drugs using sunlight

Re:Artificial leaf produces first drugs using sunlight by Qwertystop on Monday September 09, 2019 @01:27PM (#20920224)

From the article and video, looks like the requirements are a thin tube and a block of translucent material to focus light onto the tube. And presumably the tube needs to be the right length, to give it enough sun time to react at a given flow speed.

I would guess that while the leaf shape in particular is not required, the loose space-filling curve is a good shape for the tube to get the most use out of the block. Could it perhaps be slightly more space-efficient with a rectangle and a heater-coil shape? Maybe, but I'd expect not by much, and I would expect other resource constraints (the reactants) to matter before you've filled all available sunny spots and need to maximize medicine-per-square-meter, if only because sunny rooftops are not exactly high-demand space.

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Re:Artificial leaf produces first drugs using sunlight by dpflan on Monday September 09, 2019 @01:40PM (#20920394)

I saw the leaves, read the article, then thought the leaf structure was a mere contrivance that wasn't necessary and perhaps made scaling manufacturing actually a bit harder/expensive than simpler geometries (neither chem nor manufacturing are domains I claim to understand, so someone more knowledgeable may have real insights).

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Re:Artificial leaf produces first drugs using sunlight by tripletmass on Tuesday September 10, 2019 @01:49AM (#20925378)

The change from silicone to rigid stuff also smacks of way better insect resilience in the field. (n.b. photochemistry to work under 3 bar as to keep plastic from creeping into leaky balloon form.)

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