Solar panels on roof (Wikimedia Commons, author: Parker D; cropped)
It’s, probably, hard to find a person who haven’t heard about the solar energy panels or solar batteries. Apparently, the solar market is one of the booming markets in North America, especially in the United States. The solar panels are used for telecommunicating and powering of many things, starting from the small households and vehicles and finishing with the giant power stations and spacecrafts. What new would we expect from the technology?
Appeared to be, there is one possible application of the technology, which is hard to achieve – a discrete integrating of the photovoltaic materials into the existing structures or the advanced technologies, like the smartphones. Here, I’m talking about the transparent solar panels. Noticeably, the majority of the solar batteries are dark coloured and solid, which allows them to harvest the maximum of the solar energy, but at the same time makes the installation possible mainly on the non-transparent surfaces. That’s why the scientists put their efforts to find a new solution for the transparent surfaces.
In the beginning, the existed technologies for the photovoltaic glass allowed the researchers to reach 60% of transparency with an efficiency of 2% . The later adoption of the perovskite semitransparent “islands” opened the new opportunities in integrating the solar panels into the transparent surfaces. However, despite the technologies above tried to solve a problem of discrete integrating, they were still not perfect due to visible distortion of the view and a low transparency rate.
Illustration from Near-infrared (NIR) harvesting transparent luminescent solar concentrators. Authors: Yimu Zhao, Garrett A. Meek, Benjamin G. Levine, Richard R. Lunt. Advanced Optical Materials Volume 2, Issue 7, pages 606–611, July 2014
At the same time, the team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) started to work on the project with a key word “transparent” for it, because, according to Richard Lunt, MSU’s College of Engineering, “No one wants to sit behind coloured glass.” By 2014 they have developed a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could be embedded in any glass surface and transform it to a power source. As for the way it works, the organic luminescent salts absorb specific non-visible wavelengths of ultraviolet and infrared light, which they transmute into another wavelength of infrared light. This light falls onto the thin plastic photovoltaic strips, which convert it into electricity. The only drawback of such technology is the efficiency, which is currently being around 1%. However, the team of researchers hopes to bring it up to 10% in the nearest future.
An interesting video from MSU (Youtube.com):
So, why is this invention is so important for us? Imagine to have an entire glass-covered multi-storey building as a power generator or to use your own phone/tablet as a charger! The best part is the ability to integrate such transparent panels into the existing structures without bringing any discomfort to people, such as a dimmed light or a distorted picture. That is, definitely, one of the big steps towards a brighter future!
~Alex Budkina
