How to Make Solar Cells Printable, Paintable, and Flexible

A Rice University  lab is working on making solar cells that are stretchable, printable, and paintable. Biomolecular engineer Rafael Verduzco and his team have developed flexible organic photovoltaics with a chemical additive that mitigates the material’s brittle qualities. The lab is using 'thiol-ene' molecules that infiltrate the polymer and form a mesh that makes the material stretchable, without losing efficiency.

Transcript

00:00:01 [Music] I'm a professor at chemical and biomolecular engineering here at Rice University and my lab focuses on polymer science what we're working on here is trying to make solar cells that are printable paintable and flexible and this is one device that we made here this is made using organic materials it's an example

00:00:29 of an organic photovoltaic device and so this very thin kind of red layer that's painted on this surface on this plastic flexible surface is the photovoltaic device so the challenge with these materials is that even though they may look very flexible in fact most of the materials that are used in these types of devices they tend to crack and fail once you flex them like this or

00:00:58 especially if you stretch and Bend and roll them and this is another example of something you might want to make of a photovoltaic device than just a very light flexible substrate if you can fabricate solar cells on the surface like this or like this you can almost put them anywhere you can put them on buildings on windows on clothes and so that'll really give you access to solar

00:01:19 energy wherever you wanted in a lightweight portable device this class of materials which are polymers that actually conduct electricity and generate and separate charges that seem very exciting to me from the idea of combining the properties of polymers which are typically thought of as low-cost and a cheap materials in general they are but with some very

00:01:42 advanced electronic applications whether it's solar cells or sensors or transistors I think this combination of properties is really exciting and the idea that we can replace a lot of the hard and metallic materials around us with flexible paintable plastics I think that's an exciting idea and really opens up a lot of new technologies and new you

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