14 DAY TRIAL // As scientists have told us times and times again, the world is pretty much going to the land of down under, where no snowflake could ever dream to survive, and fossil fuels are driving the bus.
Luckily for us, brainiacs are not ones to point the finger at one problem or another without attempting to also come up with a solution. In a nutshell, researchers are doing their best to help us green up our ways.
According to media reports, scientists with the University of Sheffield are now hard at work trying to make sun energy more popular than it currently is. To achieve this, they are working on developing spray-on solar cells.
What's more, word has it that these specialists have made significant progress, meaning that, not too long ago, they successfully employed a spray-painting process to fabricate prototype perovskite solar cells, Click Green informs.
Perovskite is basically a species of calcium titanium oxide mineral. Unlike the materials currently used to make solar cells, perovskite does not cost all that much. Still, it is surprisingly efficient when it comes to absorbing light.
Hence, it is believed that perovskite-based solar cells could help reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging people to go green and ditch fossil fuels in favor of renewables, especially sun power, the same source explains.
“Remarkably, this class of material offers the potential to combine the high performance of mature solar cell technologies with the low embedded energy costs of production of organic photovoltaics,” Professor David Lidzey explained in a statement.
As part of their investigation, specialist David Lidzey and fellow researchers started by employing spray-painting method previously used to make solar cells from organic semiconductors. This method was altered so as to enable the use of perovskite.
“The perovskite devices we have created still use similar structures to organic cells. What we have done is replace the key light absorbing layer - the organic layer - with a spray-painted perovskite,” researcher David Lidzey told the press in an interview.
The prototype solar cells created by the University of Sheffield researchers had an efficiency of up to 11%. By comparison, perovskite cells created using other methods have an efficiency of 19%. The scientists hope that, in time, their spray-on cells will achieve the same efficiency.
“This study advances existing work where the perovskite layer has been deposited from solution using laboratory scale techniques. It’s a significant step towards efficient, low-cost solar cell devices made using high volume roll-to-roll processing methods,” Professor Lidzey commented on this achievement.
Courtesy of this technology, it might happen that, one day in the not-so-distant future, everyday objects will be coated in solar cells that will make it possible for them to double as sun power harvesters and energy generators.