solar toilet paper 5-Jan-11 05:29 pm
To demonstrate how a new fabrication technique can print solar cells on extremely thin, flexible materials, researchers from MIT have patterned solar cells onto ordinary toilet paper. While toilet paper may be an unlikely substrate for practical solar cell applications, it illustrates the versatility of the technique for low-cost printing on a wide variety of materials.
Karen Gleason, a chemical engineering professor at MIT, along with graduate student Miles Barr and others, showed that the technique could be used to print solar cells on a variety of delicate materials. One example is rice paper, which is used to make spring rolls in restaurants and usually dissolves in wet processes. Since the researchers’ technique is a dry, solvent-free process, the rice paper remains intact. The researchers also demonstrated the technique on plastic Saran wrap, which repels water and would normally be difficult to coat.
The new method, called oxidative chemical vapor deposition (oCVD), involves spraying a vapor of a monomer and an oxidizing agent onto a substrate. The monomer and oxidizing agent polymerize when they meet and form PEDOT plastic. The plastic itself is conductive, but the conductivity can be further increased up to 1,000 times by controlling the substrate temperature so that small nanopores form, which can be laced with highly conductive silver particles.
发表于 2011-1-6 16:32
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发表于 2011-1-6 17:43
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