Berkeley
- University of California, Berkeley, chemists have
found a way to make cheap plastic solar cells flexible
enough to paint onto any surface and potentially able
to provide electricity for wearable electronics or
other low-power devices.
The group's
first crude solar cells have achieved efficiencies
of 1.7 percent, far less than the 10 percent efficiencies
of today's standard commercial photovoltaics. The
best solar cells, which are very expensive semiconductor
laminates, convert, at most, 35 percent of the sun's
energy into electricity.
"Our
efficiency is not good enough yet by about a factor
of 10, but this technology has the potential to do
a lot better," said A. Paul Alivisatos, professor
of chemistry at UC Berkeley and a member of the Materials
Science Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"There is a pretty clear path for us to take
to make this perform much better."
Alivisatos
and his co-authors, graduate student Wendy U. Huynh
and post-doctoral fellow Janke J. Dittmer, report
their development in the March 29 issue of Science.
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