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.

Comments

How damage resistant is it?

[Sowelu]

Many other types of solar cells suffer badly from any damage anywhere, however small. Putting this stuff on clothes or on a notebook, or on a vehicle that might get whacked by a rock, seems like a pretty damage heavy environment...rooftop solar doesn't usually have that problem because it's stationary.

Re: How damage resistant is it?

[johnsmithperson123]

Watts per square inch is more important. If I have a ultrathin solar panel and it gets that many grams/watt it probably takes a huge surface area to get that power.

Re:How damage resistant is it?

[mark-t]

I know you were trying to troll, but this doesn't threaten oil companies... the applications for this kind of cell are mainly restricted to those where weight is a more important factor than strictly just the cell's efficiency, which is generally limited to things that are either space or near-space bound.

Re: How damage resistant is it?

[Ravaldy]

Watts per square inch is more important. If I have a ultrathin solar panel and it gets that many grams/watt it probably takes a huge surface area to get that power.

You need to read the article to understand why it's an advance. For 1 the process itself creates clearer cells hence an increase in efficiency. It you want to compare conventional cells to this one you need to have comparative data as you mentioned which we do not have. In their application watts per grams is ideal because their current intended use is on flying objects such as weather balloons. Here's the part of the article:

While the solar cell in this demonstration device is not especially efficient, because of its low weight, its power-to-weight ratio is among the highest ever achieved. That’s important for applications where weight is important, such as on spacecraft or on high-altitude helium balloons used for research. Whereas a typical silicon-based solar module, whose weight is dominated by a glass cover, may produce about 15 watts of power per kilogram of weight, the new cells have already demonstrated an output of 6 watts per gram — about 400 times higher.

Re:How damage resistant is it?

[MightyMartian]

Space craft should also use oil and coal, like Jesus would want. Jesus despises renewables, and anyone advocating them will go to Hell, after they've been thoroughly beaten by God-fearing fossil fuel advocates. Remember, God loves fossil fuels, and will make advocates of other energy sources pay for eternity.

Re:How damage resistant is it?

[dpidcoe]

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.

Re:How damage resistant is it?

[NatasRevol]

Source? Cause that'd be cool to see.

Re:How damage resistant is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob#Propulsion_of_steel_plate_cap

Re: How damage resistant is it?

[Squirmy McPhee]

Watts per square inch is more important. If I have a ultrathin solar panel and it gets that many grams/watt it probably takes a huge surface area to get that power.

You need to read the article to understand why it's an advance. For 1 the process itself creates clearer cells hence an increase in efficiency. It you want to compare conventional cells to this one you need to have comparative data as you mentioned which we do not have. In their application watts per grams is ideal because their current intended use is on flying objects such as weather balloons. Here's the part of the article:

While the solar cell in this demonstration device is not especially efficient, because of its low weight, its power-to-weight ratio is among the highest ever achieved. That’s important for applications where weight is important, such as on spacecraft or on high-altitude helium balloons used for research. Whereas a typical silicon-based solar module, whose weight is dominated by a glass cover, may produce about 15 watts of power per kilogram of weight, the new cells have already demonstrated an output of 6 watts per gram — about 400 times higher.

"Clearer cells" does not mean an increase in efficiency, in fact it means just the opposite. A clear solar cell is not absorbing a significant amount of light (or at least if it is, it is not producing a significant voltage, and hence not much power), whereas conventional opaque solar cells absorb extremely efficiently in the part of the spectrum where the sun produces the most photons.

Furthermore, the W/g comparison from the article is utterly meaningless. A solar cell made from a 180-micron-thick silicon wafer can't survive the elements without encapsulation, hence the heavy glass sheet for terrestrial solar modules. Even solar cells launched into space are protected by a polymer encapsulant and a glass sheet (though both are much thinner and lighter than for a terrestrial module). Implying that you can replace a fully encapsulated solar module with a completely unprotected polymer solar cell 1/10th the thickness of a sheet of cellophane to is like saying you can replace a boat's sail with a sheet of gauze and steer your way through a gale. Sure, maybe the cell does put out more W/g than a conventional cell, but quantifying the claim like this makes them look dishonest.

Finally, to date, organic solar cell degrade rapidly when exposed to light -- so rapidly that organic cell researchers have been known to transport their cells to certification labs in light-tight boxes and supervise their efficiency measurements to ensure the cells are not needlessly exposed to light for even a few minutes. Add the high-radiation environment of space to the mix and you aren't likely to see these cells being shot into space anytime soon. Not to mention that even undegraded the cells are only 2.3%-efficient. The cells used in space applications are already significantly lighter than the structures they're mounted on, so cutting the efficiency by more than a factor of 10 is likely to result in increased weight no matter how light the cells are.

Re:How damage resistant is it?

[Squirmy McPhee]

"there's no such thing as a glass-based solar cell"

Fucking what? Glass is silicon. Most solar cells are silicon. Which dimension did you pop in from, sonny?

Glass is silicon? Really? You must think water is hydrogen, too, then.

Let me correct you: Glass is (mostly) silicon dioxide. Silicon and silicon dioxide are not the same thing -- they are fundamentally different compounds with fundamentally different physical properties. Just like water is partly composed of hydrogen atoms, but water and hydrogen are fundamentally different compounds. If you had ever actually seen silicon before there's no way you would mistake it for glass.

Re: How damage resistant is it?

[Ol Olsoc]

Actually, all us evil non lefties object to is subsidies for green energy, just like we object to subsidies for fossil fuel extraction.

Odd, every far right winger I know tells me that the subsidies for oil and gas extraction are needed because the oil and gas are critical needs.

Case in point. Former Governor of Pennsylvania claimed that taxes on natural gas production would force Natural gas companies to drill elsewhere. DO I need to mention just how asinine a statement that is? Considering that even God's own Texas taxes energy production, that 20 percent or so makes for something that looks a whole lot like a subsidy.

And we gave it away.

Is giving things away part of the invisible hand of the free market? Seems to me that no matter who you are, a god fearing free marketeer, of some syphilitic inbred left of center socialist asshole, if you have a desirable commodity, you should be compensated for it. Meanwhile, they drilled like crazy for a few years, helped create a natural gas glut, and have now left, with all the jerbs they promised. Or better said, allowed dumbasses to believe they were creating.

Watts per gram?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Interesting, but portable products are also fairly limited by available surface area, which apparently has not changed in terms of amount needed per Watt.

Re:Watts per gram?

[dsmatthews9379]

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.

Re:400 times more power per gram? Great news!

[gstoddart]

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.

Re:One more time

[afidel]

That totally depends on the application. For backpacking I care about W/g, for delivering to the middle of nowhere I care about W/g and W/L (each gallon of fuel delivered to a forward base in Afghanistan cost $400). For my roof I care about $/W and W/m^2. It all depends on use case as to what parameter you need to optimize for.

puts out 400 times more power

[swell]

watts per gram ?
Since when is that a measurement standard?

By that standard, my car provides152HP per muffler bearing. Its MTBF is 32 dog years and fuel efficiency is 1.4 teaspoons per nautical mile . . . Oh, I get it- this is more slash spam where big numbers are inserted somewhere to wow the ignorant.

Complete bullshit

[gweihir]

You do not measure solar cell efficiency in "watt per gram", you measure them in percent of the light-energy converted to current. But I guess with conventional cells now up to 20% or so, they could not have claimed a completely inane "400x improvement".