That day is not much far away, when solar panels could be sprayed on to a surface rather than installing by a team of experts on rooftops.
Researchers from Toronto University of Applied Science & Engineering have developed a new method to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces.
The team used miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs).
After spraying the CQDs onto any surface, it can be installed on rooftops and these thin panels will hardly be noticeable.
“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,” said, Illan Kramer, post-doctoral at the University of Toronto and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Centre.
Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film can be used to coat all kinds of objects from laptops to aircraft wings.
The surface of a car roof if solar coated, will produce enough power for three 100-Watt light bulbs or 24 compact fluorescents.
With the help of a spray nozzle and a few air brushes, the investigating team demonstrated the achievement successfully.
The technique is called sprayLD and the LD stands for layer deposition. This is a common manufacturing process in which a coating is applied to a surface one atom-thickness at a time.
SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper.
Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing.
This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into the manufacturing processes much simpler.
Two papers already published on this subject prove that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any loss in solar-cell efficiency.
As quantum dot solar technology advances rapidly in performance, it’s important to determine how to scale them and make this new class of solar technologies manufactural, added Kramer.
Sabeena Wahid
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