• Skip to main content
  • Skip to secondary menu
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Engineering Designer Magazine

Engineering Designer

  • Home
  • Technology
  • Education
  • Sustainability
  • Materials
  • Medical
  • Construction
  • Advertise
  • iED
You are here: Home / Materials / Paper-thin solar cell can turn any surface into a power source

Paper-thin solar cell can turn any surface into a power source

December 16, 2022 by Geordie Torr

A team of engineers at MIT has developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.

Advertisement

The durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies. They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, generate 18 times more power-per-kilogram and are made from semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.

Because they are so thin and lightweight, the solar cells can be laminated onto many different surfaces. For instance, they could be integrated onto the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea, adhered onto tents and tarps that are deployed in disaster-recovery operations, or applied to the wings of drones to extend their flying range. The lightweight solar technology can also be easily integrated into built environments with minimal installation needs.

Advertisement

‘The metrics used to evaluate a new solar cell technology are typically limited to their power-conversion efficiency and their cost in dollars-per-watt,’ said Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh chair in emerging technology at MIT. ‘Just as important is integrability – the ease with which the new technology can be adapted.’

Traditional silicon solar cells are fragile, so they must be encased in glass and packaged in thick, heavy aluminium framing, which limits where and how they can be deployed.

Six years ago, the MIT team produced solar cells using an emerging class of thin-film materials that were so lightweight that they could sit on top of a soap bubble. However, these ultrathin solar cells were fabricated using complex, vacuum-based processes, which can be expensive and challenging to scale up.

In the present work, they set out to develop thin-film solar cells that are entirely printable, using ink-based materials and scalable fabrication techniques. To produce the solar cells, they use nanomaterials that are in the form of a printable electronic inks. Working in the MIT.nano clean room, they coat the solar cell structure using a slot-die coater, which deposits layers of the electronic materials onto a prepared, releasable substrate that is only three microns thick. Using screen printing, an electrode is deposited on the structure to complete the solar module.

The researchers can then peel the printed module, which is about 15 microns thick, off the plastic substrate, forming an ultralight solar device. However, such thin, freestanding solar modules are challenging to handle and can easily tear, which would make them difficult to deploy. To solve this challenge, the MIT team searched for a lightweight, flexible and high-strength substrate to which they could adhere the solar cells. They identified fabrics as the optimal solution, as they provide mechanical resilience and flexibility with little added weight.

The ideal material proved to be a composite fabric that weighs only 13 grams per square metre, commercially known as Dyneema. The fabric is made of fibres that are so strong that they were used as ropes to right the stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia. By adding a layer of UV-curable glue, which is only a few microns thick, they adhere the solar modules to sheets of this fabric to form an ultra-light and mechanically robust solar structure.

‘While it might appear simpler to just print the solar cells directly on the fabric, this would limit the selection of possible fabrics or other receiving surfaces to the ones that are chemically and thermally compatible with all the processing steps needed to make the devices. Our approach decouples the solar cell manufacturing from its final integration,’ explained Mayuran Saravanapavanantham, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student.

When they tested the device, the researchers found that it could generate 730 watts of power per kilogram when freestanding and about 370 watts per kilogram if deployed on the high-strength Dyneema fabric, which is about 18 times more power per kilogram than conventional solar cells.

‘A typical rooftop solar installation in Massachusetts is about 8,000 watts. To generate that same amount of power, our fabric photovoltaics would only add about 20 kilograms to the roof of a house,’ Saravanapavanantham said.

The team also tested the durability of the devices and found that, even after rolling and unrolling a fabric solar panel more than 500 times, the cells still retained more than 90 per cent of their initial power-generation capabilities.

While the solar cells are much lighter and more flexible than traditional cells, they would need to be encased in another material to protect them from the environment. The carbon-based organic material used to make the cells could be modified by interactions with moisture and oxygen in the air, which could cause their performance to deteriorate.

‘Encasing these solar cells in heavy glass, as is standard with the traditional silicon solar cells, would minimise the value of the present advancement, so the team is currently developing ultrathin packaging solutions that would only fractionally increase the weight of the present ultralight devices,’ said Jeremiah Mwaura, a research scientist in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics.

The research has been published in Small Methods.

Filed Under: Materials, Sustainability, Technology

Advertisement

Primary Sidebar

SUBSCRIBE And get a FREE Magazine

Want a FREE magazine each and every month jam-packed with the latest engineering and design news, views and features?

ED Update Magazine

Simply let us know where to send it by entering your name and email below. Immediate access.

Trending

New wearable ultrasound device can monitor heart function on the go

Asthma-busting backpack wins kids’ design competition

New study suggests that eggshells and lentils could be used in car interiors by 2030

New carbon capture technology turns CO2 into methanol cheaply

MARVEL robot can climb walls and walk on ceilings

Tiny robots inspiored by click beetles

Collaborators create innovative geotechnical sensor for road monitoring

Scientists develop precision arm for miniature robots

Engineering start-up secures investment for technology to release seized nuts and bolts

British company to design green gas-to-power barges for Greek islands

Footer

About Engineering Designer

Engineering Designer is the quarterly journal of the Insitution of Engineering Designers.

It is produced by the IED for our Members and for those who have an interest in engineering and product design, as well as CAD users.

Click here to learn more about the IED.

Other Pages

  • Contact us
  • About us
  • Privacy policy
  • Terms
  • Institution of Engineering Designers

Search

Tags

ied

Copyright © 2023 · Site by Syon Media