The thin-film solar cells weigh about 100 times less than standard solar cells while producing about 18 times more power-per-kilogram. Credit: Melanie Gonick, MIT
A team of scientists has developed a new strategy for producing lightweight and ultrathin solar cells that can be seamlessly incorporated into any surface area.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) engineers have actually created brand-new ultralight fabric solar cells, which can change any surface area into a power source with ease and speed.
These resilient, flexible solar batteries, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, light-weight fabric, making them easy to set up on a repaired surface area. They can offer energy on the go as a wearable power material or be transferred and quickly deployed in remote areas for help in emergencies. They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, produce 18 times more power-per-kilogram, and are made from semiconducting inks using printing procedures that can be scaled in the future to large-area production.
Due to the fact that they are so thin and light-weight, these solar cells can be laminated onto numerous various surface areas. They might be incorporated onto the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea, adhered onto camping tents and tarps that are released in disaster recovery operations, or applied onto the wings of drones to extend their flying variety. This lightweight solar innovation can be quickly incorporated into developed environments with very little setup needs.
MIT researchers have actually developed a scalable fabrication strategy to produce ultrathin, light-weight solar batteries that can be stuck onto any surface. Credit: Melanie Gonick, MIT
” The metrics used to evaluate a new solar cell technology are generally restricted to their power conversion efficiency and their cost in dollars-per-watt. The lightweight solar materials make it possible for integrability, offering inspiration for the present work.
Signing up with Bulović on the paper are co-lead authors Mayuran Saravanapavanantham, an electrical engineering and computer technology graduate student at MIT; and Jeremiah Mwaura, a research study researcher in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. The research study was just recently released in the journal Small Methods.
Slimmed down solar
Standard silicon solar batteries are delicate, so they must be encased in glass and packaged in heavy, thick aluminum framing, which restricts where and how they can be released.
Six years earlier, the ONE Lab group produced solar cells utilizing an emerging class of thin-film materials that were so lightweight they might sit on top of a soap bubble. But these ultrathin solar batteries were made utilizing complex, vacuum-based processes, which can be costly and tough to scale up.
In this work, they set out to establish thin-film solar cells that are totally printable, utilizing ink-based materials and scalable fabrication methods.
To produce the solar cells, they use nanomaterials that are in the form of a printable electronic inks. Operating in the MIT.nano tidy space, they coat the solar battery structure utilizing a slot-die coater, which deposits layers of the electronic materials onto a ready, releasable substrate that is only 3 microns thick. Utilizing screen printing (a strategy comparable to how designs are contributed to silkscreened T-shirts), an electrode is transferred on the structure to finish the solar module.
The scientists can then peel the printed module, which has to do with 15 microns in density, off the plastic substrate, forming an ultralight solar gadget.
But such thin, freestanding solar modules are challenging to handle and can easily tear, which would make them difficult to deploy. To fix this difficulty, the MIT team searched for a lightweight, versatile, and high-strength substrate they could adhere the solar cells to. They recognized materials as the optimum service, as they offer mechanical resilience and versatility with little added weight.
By adding a layer of UV-curable glue, which is only a few microns thick, they adhere the solar modules to sheets of this material. This forms a mechanically robust and ultra-light solar structure.
” While it might appear easier to just print the solar cells directly on the material, this would limit the choice of possible materials or other receiving surfaces to the ones that are chemically and thermally compatible with all the processing steps required to make the devices. Our technique decouples the solar cell manufacturing from its final integration,” Saravanapavanantham describes.
Beating standard solar batteries
When they tested the gadget, the MIT scientists found it could create 730 watts of power per kilogram when freestanding and about 370 watts-per-kilogram if deployed on the high-strength Dyneema fabric, which has to do with 18 times more power-per-kilogram than conventional solar batteries.
” A typical roof solar setup in Massachusetts has to do with 8,000 watts. To create that same amount of power, our material photovoltaics would just include about 20 kgs (44 pounds) to the roof of a house,” he says.
They also checked the sturdiness of their gadgets and discovered that, even after rolling and unrolling a fabric solar panel more than 500 times, the cells still retained more than 90 percent of their initial power generation capabilities.
While their solar cells are far lighter and far more versatile than standard cells, they would require to be framed in another material to protect them from the environment. The carbon-based organic product utilized to make the cells might be modified by engaging with wetness and oxygen in the air, which could weaken their efficiency.
” Encasing these solar batteries in heavy glass, as is standard with the traditional silicon solar cells, would decrease the worth of today improvement, so the group is currently establishing ultrathin product packaging solutions that would just fractionally increase the weight of today ultralight gadgets,” says Mwaura.
” We are working to get rid of as much of the non-solar-active material as possible while still retaining the kind aspect and efficiency of these ultralight and flexible solar structures. For example, we understand the manufacturing process can be further streamlined by printing the releasable substrates, equivalent to the process we use to produce the other layers in our device. This would speed up the translation of this innovation to the marketplace,” he adds.
Reference: “Printed Organic Photovoltaic Modules on Transferable Ultra-thin Substrates as Additive Power Sources” by Mayuran Saravanapavanantham, Jeremiah Mwaura and Vladimir Bulović, 9 December 2022, Small Methods.DOI: 10.1002/ smtd.202200940.
The research study was moneyed by the MIT Energy Initiative, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
These resilient, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight material, making them easy to set up on a fixed surface area.” The metrics used to examine a new solar cell innovation are generally limited to their power conversion efficiency and their cost in dollars-per-watt. To produce the solar cells, they utilize nanomaterials that are in the form of an electronic inks. Working in the MIT.nano clean space, they coat the solar cell structure utilizing a slot-die coater, which transfers layers of the electronic materials onto a prepared, releasable substrate that is only 3 microns thick. To resolve this obstacle, the MIT team searched for a light-weight, flexible, and high-strength substrate they might adhere the solar cells to.
