Boffins come up with cheap solar cells

Top boffin Somenath Mitra, PhD, wants punters to be able to turn their homes into power stations by printing the panels with ink-jet printers and sticking the sheets onto a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.

The system, with the catchy title fullerene single wall carbon nanotube complex for polymer bulk heterojunction photovoltaic cells, is the cover story for the June 21, 2007 edition of Journal of Materials Chemistry, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. We get the magazine for the join the dots competition.

Current solar panels, such as those which power the INQ, require purified silicon. This is not the sort of material which can be made in a back garden shed.

However, Mitra said that developing organic solar cells from polymers is a cheap and potentially simpler alternative. They can be inexpensively printed or simply painted on exterior building walls and/or roof tops.

The solar cell developed at NJIT uses carbon nanotubes as wires and combined them with tiny carbon Buckyballs (known as fullerenes). If the polymers are excited by electrons the buckyballs will grab the electrons. Nanotubes, behaving like copper wires, will then be able to make the electrons or current flow.

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