The ultralight solar cells are made of semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.
"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. Just as important is integrability — the ease with which the new technology can be adapted," Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology, leader of the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory , director of MIT.
The paper-thin solar cells are made of semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing. One-hundredth the weight of conventional solar cells, the former generates 18 times more power per kilogram, which is quite impressive. The solar cells were glued on a composite fabric that weighs only 13 grams per square meter, known as Dyneema. This fabric is known to be sturdy; adhering the solar modules to sheets of this fabric only resulted in a mechanically robust solar structure.
These solar cells, however, need to be encased in a material that can protect them from the environment. "Encasing these solar cells in heavy glass, as is standard with the traditional silicon solar cells, would minimize 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.
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