New ultra-thin solar cell that can turn any surface into a power source

MIT researchers are developing a scalable manufacturing technique to produce ultra-thin, lightweight solar cells that can be attached seamlessly to any surface.

These durable and flexible solar cells, much finer than a human hair, are glued on a resistant and light fabric, which facilitates their installation on a fixed surface. They can provide power on the go as a portable power matrix or be quickly transported and deployed to remote locations for emergency assistance.

They weigh a hundred times less than conventional photovoltaic panelsgenerate 18 times more energy per kilogram and are manufactured with semiconductor inks using printing processes that may be scaled up for large-scale manufacturing in the future.

Being so thin and light, these solar cells can be laminated to a wide variety of surfaces. For example, they could be integrated into the sails of a ship to provide power at sea, attached to tents and tarps that are deployed in disaster recovery operations, or applied to the wings of drones to extend their reach. flight. This lightweight solar technology can be easily integrated into built environments with minimal installation requirements.

To manufacture the solar cells, they use nanomaterials in the form of printable electronic inks. Working in the clean room at MIT.nano, they coat the solar cell structure using a slit coater, which deposits layers of electronic materials onto a prepared, peel-off substrate just 3 microns thick. . Using screen printing (a technique similar to that of the patterns that are added to screen-printed T-shirts), an electrode is placed on the structure to complete the solar module.

Researchers can then peel the printed module, about 15 microns thick, from the plastic substrate, forming an ultralight solar panel.

But these thin, self-contained solar modules are unwieldy and can easily break, making deployment difficult. To solve this problem, the MIT team searched for a light, flexible and strong substrate to which the solar cells could adhere. They identified fabrics as the optimal solution, as they provide mechanical strength and flexibility with little added weight.

They found an ideal material: a composite fabric that weighs only 13 grams per square meter, known commercially as Dyneema. This fabric is made of fibers so strong that they were used as ropes to lift the sunken cruise ship Costa Concordia from the bottom of the Mediterranean. By adding a layer of UV-hardening glue, a few microns thick, they glue the solar modules to sheets of this fabric. Thus, an ultralight and mechanically robust solar structure is formed.

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Outperforms conventional solar cells.

When testing the device, MIT researchers found that it could generate 730 watts of power per kilogram when freestanding and about 370 watts per kilogram when deployed on heavy-duty Dyneema fabric, or about 18 times more power per kilogram than conventional solar cells. .

They also tested the durability of their devices and found that even after rolling and unrolling a fabric solar panel more than 500 times, the cells still retained more than 90% of their original power-generating capacity.

Although its solar cells are much lighter and more flexible than traditional ones, they should be coated with another material to protect them. The carbon-based organic material used to make the cells could be altered by interacting with humidity and oxygen in the air, which could affect their performance. They are working to fix this problem.

Going through mit.edu

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