Plastic Power | Convergence Online

Paintable Photovoltaics

Unlike the familiar rigid silicon cells that provide power for spacecraft and calculators, the plastic cells are thin, flexible films. Heeger says they can be applied like paint and literally printed like ink, using “standard printing tools.” Though they currently lag behind silicon in raw efficiency – the percentage of light converted to electricity – they are potentially much cheaper than silicon to produce and install.

The development of plastic photovoltaics is a “worldwide effort,” says Heeger, a professor of physics and materials who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry for discovering polymers that conduct electricity. (He is also chief scientist and co-founder of a company, Konarka Technologies, working to commercialize the new solar-cell technology as “Power Plastic.”) The new tandem solar cells were developed by Lee and Heeger along with Jin Young Kim at Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology in Korea and Nelson Coates, Daniel Moses, Thuc-Quyen Nguyen and Mark Dante of CPOS.

The cells’ leap in efficiency comes from the use of two layers of photovoltaic material that are sensitive to different parts of the spectrum. Together, they absorb light (and energy) from a wider range of wavelengths than a single cell would. They are connected by a transparent layer of titanium oxide that serves as a conductor,

Plastic Power | Convergence Online