Colorful solar cells
Researchers from the University of Michigan brought solar industry to a new level as they invented colorful transparent cells with decorations and shades.
The first see-trough colored cells can easily be used to harvest energy from the sun and beautifuly decorate the buildings where they are installed, and boost the solar energy installations.
An electrical engineering and computer science professor, mechanical engineering, and macromolecular science and engineering at U-M, Jay Guo says that “this offers a very different way of utilizing solar technology rather than concentrating it in a small area. Today, solar panels are black and the only place you can put them on a building is the rooftop. And the rooftop of a typical high-rise is so tiny. We think we can make solar panels more beautiful—any color a designer wants. And we can vastly deploy these panels, even indoors.”
Guo, the lead author of a paper about the work newly published, says that solar panels like this could be installed in a large variety of places, such as: side of building, bilboards or windows.
The new technology was demonstrated on an American flag model. “All the red stripes, the blue background and so on—they are all working solar cells,” Guo said. The model has a 2% efficiency. A normal-sized solar panel can produce sufficient energy for lightning and small devices.
The only drawback of this model is the fact that even if the researchers are struggling to improve the figures, the fact that colored panels reflect the light from the sun and not converting it into electricity will never change. So the beautifuly design has its costs. Still, as opposed to other colored cells, these ones don’t use microstructures that can harm the process as they are built to transmit certain light wavelengths