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MIT Develops Ultra Thin, Light Weight, Efficient Solar Cells (blastingnews.com)
MarkWhittington writes: Researchers at MIT have developed a gossamer thin solar cell that is made of layers of flexible polymers. The cell is so light that it can rest on a soap bubble without breaking it. As a bonus, the thin, light cells puts out 400 times more power than the standard, glass covered photovoltaic cells, at about six watts per gram. According to the researchers, this new development could help power the next generation of portable electronic devices.
You know, I bet if you could unfurl 10 or 20 feet of it, it would also be useful in a lot of places.
Hell, for camping make an entire tarp out of it. It's both your shelter over the picnic table and your power source. If it's portable, light, and flexible it's not like there aren't situations in which you can simply let it cover area once you get it there.
If the mass is low enough, getting a sufficient area to a location to be useful becomes a whole lot easier.
I can imagine tons of places where people would say "yeah, so, I've got 50' of space I can put this". How many watts can you get out of a 50' strip? I'm betting more than enough to be useful.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
A manhole cover quite possibly made it to space on nuclear alone after an incident involving underground testing. The high speed footage puts its minimum speed at something well past escape velocity.
How about this for an application, the cells are so light that they can form the skin of a hydrogen lofted blimp with enough surface area to run all of it's payload and convert it's water ballast to hydrogen to allow for buoyancy control. The reverse process of ballast recovery uses a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell so that no water is lost in total, and additional power is generated. What we are talking about here is mid to upper stratosphere cruising blimps with an endurance measured in years. e.g. Project Loon type communications networks. These are particularly important as they can be deployed very quickly if our communications satellites are destroyed by a solar flare and we can't put more of them up quickly because the dead ones also triggered a space junk collision cascade.