Recently, we have been following the latest progress of MIT’s latest project on creating a solar cell-coated paper, of which ordinary printed papers can be turned into an instant solar energy source.
Apparently, this project has started last year by a team of MIT students.
At a first glance, the solar cells may look like an ordinary sheet of paper with fine colored rectangles, but when this paper is connected to a pair of wires it will create solar electricity.
This solar energy technology is like printing a paper from an ink jet printer, however in a more technical sense, the printing process utilizes low temperatures of less than 120 degree Celsius or 248 Farenheit to transfer the thin layers of photovoltaic cells to a piece of untreated material like the paper, plastic or fabric.
This was done in a vacuum chamber where vapor-deposition occurs.
Moreover, the team of this project has tested the durability of this solar cells and they found out that by laminating the solar paper it can be easily use outdoors for it will be wind and rain proofed.
Basically, they printed the cells onto the sheet of plastic soda bottles and folded/unfolded it for many times.
In an outstanding result, there was no problem on the performance of the solar cells in each fold. This means that the project could open the way of solving the use of expensive materials on the present solar energy systems.
This progress motivates the MIT team to make more improvements on the efficiency of the solar paper cells. Although the current output is said to be good enough to power a small device, their aim is to achieve more than 1% of efficiency rate.
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