Spray-on solar power?
20 Jul '07 from the editors
Imagine waking up one morning, deciding that you want to start using solar power, and then printing some photovoltaic cells from your home-based inkjet printer. Or just having some sprayed onto a piece of plastic?
It sounds like something right out of the Jetsons, but that's what they're talking about today over at the Sustainable Design Update.
Apparently, Somenath Mitra, PhD of the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), has developed a cheap solar material that is both sprayable and printable.
Sustainable Design Update quotes him as saying, “The process is simple. Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”
We're amazed.
Read the whole story at Science Daily.
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The idea of haveing spray-,
The idea of haveing spray-, print- or paintable photovoltaics have been worked on for some year by many different researchers and companies around the world. A few times a year a new research team has announced similar news for the past 5 year, but so fare with little flatering results, because the efficiency has been too low compaered to the 1. generation crystalic solar cells, and first of all the 3. gereration is too vounable. But I belive that we eventually will see this senario become real some day, and from an architects perspecftive it has a great potential. I give us the oppertunity to work with different colors, patterns, transparencies, and to integrate solarcells in building components, that can enrich buildings insted of disfigure them.
but there is a long way to go...
Søren Korsgaard
Architect
paint on too
In April 2007, Dr. Wayne Campbell and researchers at New Zealand's Massey University announced that they had developed organic-based dyes from a compound commonly found on the country's beaches, titanium dioxide. This compound has been used in a variety of products for some time now including toothpaste and cosmetics, demonstrating that it is significantly less toxic (in fact, non-toxic altogether) than conventional PVs and potentially than other forms of Graetzel cells. On top of this, the expected cost of a PV employing this organic dye is about 1/10th the cost of a conventional silicon-based PV.
Graetzel cells are PVs sensitized with dyes and up until April 2006 had been faced with the problem of losing efficiency when temperatures were higher than roughly the mid-80's. Further research that was suggested after this announcement was to begin incorporating this technology into roofing and wall panels. Another source, which I am now at a loss for, mentioned developing exterior and potentially even interior paints to do the same thing.
G24 Innovations, a British company, has announced that it began production of Campbell's improvement later that same month that the development was released to the public. You can read their press release here; http://www.greenjobs.com/public/industrynews/inews02077.htm.
You can read Massey University's press release here; http://masseynews.massey.ac.nz/2007/Press_Releases/04-04-07.html.
Wow, that would be amazing!
Wow, that would be amazing! Thanks for letting us know. Just imagine being able to print out your own solar panels - I'd probably get carried away and start putting the things up everywhere!