Guest Article: Sophia H. Walker writes for the solar panel battery charger blog, her personal hobby site centered on tips to help individuals save electricity using solar energy for small instruments.
College of southern California scientists suggest us of a more productive use of graphene solar panels. Could you imagine people powering their cellular phone or music/video device while jogging on a sunny day? A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that may have great potential for a brand new breed of solar cells.
In a paper recently published in the journal ACS Nano, researchers stated that organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have been proposed as a means to get inexpensive energy due to their ease of manufacture, lightweight, and compatibility with flexible substrates. The new work indicates that graphene, an extremely conductive and highly transparent kind of carbon composed of atoms-thick sheets of carbon atoms, has high potential to fill this role. While graphene’s existence has been known for many years, it has only been studied extensively since 2004 because of the impossibility of manufacturing it in high quality and quantity.
The University of southern California team has produced graphene/polymer sheets ranging in sizes about 150 square centimeters that in turn can be used to create dense arrays of flexible organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells. These organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices convert solar radiation to electricity, but not as efficiently as silicon cells. The power provided by sunlight on a sunny day is about 1,000 watts per meter square, for every 1,000 watts of sunlight that hits a square meter area of the standard silicon solar cell, 14 watts of electricity will be generated, Organic solar cells are less efficient; their conversion rate for that same 1,000 watts of sunlight in the graphene-based solar cell would be only 1.3 watts. But what graphene organic photovoltaic (OPV) lack in efficiency, can potentially be compensated by its lower price and, greater physical flexibility. Researchers think it may eventually be possible to cover with inexpensive solar cell layers extensive areas like newspapers, magazines or power generating clothing.
In the meanwhile Prof. Ruoff and his colleagues of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin, are studying the basic science in the development of graphene-based ultracapacitors for usage in electronics and other fields. Prof. Ruoff says batteries are relatively slow, they can store energy but require sometime to charge up, and then they distribute energy slowly, in time. Ultracapacitors can be charged in a short time, in seconds, and discharge quickly, but, right now, they’re not able to store very much electrical energy. The introduction of stable and less expensive ultracapacitors is seen as a key step in using wind or solar-generated power, especially if researchers will find methods to enable capacitors to store energy longer, that is not yet possible. Even with their current storage capacity, the graphene devices could provide quick energy when needed in certain situations on the green way. They could be used, as an example, to absorb heat generated in braking a car or train, and store it for a short time, and employ it for the electrical needs of the vehicle (i.e. starting the automobile or acceleration)
