Researchers found a way to make silicon solar cells using 1% of the materials needed for the conventional solar cells.
U.S. researchers have developed a new way to produce flexible solar cells with silicon wires using just 1% of the material necessary to make conventional solar cells.
They want to produce thin, light solar cells easy to incorporate into clothing, for instance. According to the researchers, the immediate benefit that solar panels will become cheaper and easier-to-install.
They presented the new material on Sunday in Nature Materials. Their product uses conventional silicon assembled into micron-sized wires (a micron is one-millionth of a meter) instead of brittle wafers and encases them in a flexible polymer that can be rolled or bent.
The spokesman of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Michael Kelzenberg stated in a telephone interview: "The idea is it would be lower cost and easier to work with by being more flexible than conventional silicon solar cells."
Due to higher oil prices and concerns over climate change, solar cells are now in high demand. The cells convert solar energy into electricity.
Japanese consumer electronics maker Sharp Corp and Germany's Q-Cells SE are among the many companies making thin-film solar cells using organic materials such as polymers. However, their cells are typically are less efficient at converting solar energy into electricity than conventional cells using silicon.
Kelzenberg said the material uses about 1/100th as much silicon per cell area as a silicon wafer. "It is potentially a route to bypass many of the costs associated with producing solar cells,"
According to Kelzenberg, fragility is one of the main problems when working with silicon wafers. He said the material would be about 15 percent to 20 percent efficient, about the same level as solar cells used on roofs to heat homes. But the company needs to conduct more tests.
John Rogers, professor of materials science at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Campaign, is making a similar effort, working on ways to make inorganic materials more flexible. Rogers says these materials have relatively low performance, less long-term reliability and an unproven cost structure. "We like the inorganics -- trying to adapt them and use them in non-standard ways."
His team announced last year, they developed a new manufacturing process that creates thin arrays of solar cells that are flexible enough to be rolled around a pencil and transparent enough to be used to tint windows on buildings or cars. "We can make them stretch like a rubber band or bendable like a sheet of plastic," he said.
Rogers founded the semiconductor company called Semprius Inc in Durham, North Carolina, that last month announced a joint effort with Siemens AG to develop large systems for utility-scale power generation. "The same technology they are using to make these rigid utility-scale modules could be used for flexible devices as well," said Rogers.
