New Modern Technology from PNU Makes Collapsible Solar Cells a Practical Truth

• With the recent growth of collapsible smart phone screens, research on foldable electronic devices has never been so intensive. One particularly beneficial application of collapsible technology is in solar panels.

Present solar cells are restricted to rigid, flat panels, which are tough to save in lots and incorporate into daily devices, including phones, windows, vehicles, or indoor tools. Yet, one issue stops this formidable innovation from breaking through: to be integrated into these products, solar cells require to be collapsible, to bend at will continuously without breaking. Conventional performing products utilized in solar cells do not have versatility, creating a significant challenge in establishing fully foldable cells.

A vital need for a reliable collapsible conductor is the capacity to withstand the stress of flexing within an extremely little distance while maintaining its integrity and also various other preferable residential or commercial properties. In other words, a thin, flexible, transparent, and also durable conductor product is required. Teacher Il Jeon of the Pusan National University, Korea, elaborates, "Unlike simply flexible electronic devices, collapsible devices go through much harsher deformations, with folding span as tiny as 0.5 mm. This is not feasible with conventional ultra-thin glass substrates and also steel oxide clear conductors, which can be made flexible yet never ever fully foldable."

Fortunately, a global team of researchers, consisting of Prof. Jeon, have located a remedy, in a research published in Advanced Scientific research. They determined a promising candidate to answer every one of these needs: single-walled carbon nanotube (SWNT) films, owing to their high transparency and also mechanical durability. The only issue is that SWNTs battle to adhere to the substrate surface when pressure is applied (such as bending) and requires chemical doping. To address this problem, the researchers installed the conducting layer right into a polyimide (PI) substrate, filling up deep space rooms in the nanotubes.

To guarantee optimal efficiency, they likewise "doped" the resulting material to enhance its conductivity. By introducing tiny pollutants (in this case, withdrawn electrons to molybdenum oxide) right into the SWNT-PI nanocomposite layer, the energy needed for electrons to cross the framework is much smaller, and also thus a lot more cost can be generated for an offered amount of present.

Their resulting model far exceeded the team's assumptions. Just 7 micrometers thick, the composite film showed extraordinary resistance to flexing, almost 80 percent transparency, and also a power conversion efficiency of 15.2 percent, one of the most ever before achieved in solar cells making use of carbon nanotube conductors! Actually, as mentioned by Prof. Jeon, "The acquired results are a few of the very best amongst those reported so far for flexible solar cells, both in regards to performance and mechanical security."