by Rebecca Walker — September 1, 2009—Solar cells could soon be produced more cheaply using nanoparticle “inks” that allow them to be printed like newspaper or painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops to absorb electricity-producing sunlight.
Brian Korgel, a University of Texas at Austin chemical engineer, is hoping to cut costs to one-tenth of their current price. “That’s essentially what’s needed to make solar-cell technology and photovoltaics widely adopted,” he said. “The sun provides a nearly unlimited energy resource, but existing solar energy harvesting technologies are prohibitively expensive and cannot compete with fossil fuels.”
For the past two years, Korgel and his team have been working on this low-cost, nanomaterials solution to photovoltaics or solar cell manufacturing. They showed proof-of-concept in a recent issue of Journal of the American Chemical Society.
Korgel uses the light-absorbing nanomaterials, which are 10,000 times thinner than a strand of hair, because their microscopic size allows for new physical properties that can help enable higher-efficiency devices.
Funding for the research comes from the National Science Foundation, the Welch Foundation and the Air Force Research Laboratory. For more information, see the University of Texas Web site.
