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posted by martyb on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the going-green-literally dept.

Science Daily has an article on a new way to promote the use of solar energy, by developing new colors using silicon nanopatterns. Those solar panels then may be more easily used to beautify (or at least blend into) areas. Although, there is an efficiency hit, there is also potential to use this to increase overall efficiency through layering dedicated spectrum absorbing layers.

Solar panels have tremendous potential to provide affordable renewable energy, but many people see traditional black and blue panels as an eyesore. Architects, homeowners and city planners may be more open to the technology if they could install green panels that melt into the landscape, red panels on rooftops and white ones camouflaged as walls.

A new study published this week in Applied Physics Letters, from AIP Publishing, brings us one step closer to a future of colorful, efficient solar panels. Researchers have developed a method for imprinting existing solar panels with silicon nanopatterns that scatter green light back toward an observer. The panels have a green appearance from most angles yet only show about a 10 percent power reduction due to the loss of absorbed green light.

[...] Neder and colleagues created their efficient, green solar panels through soft-imprint lithography, which works somewhat like an optical rubber stamp to imprint a dense array of silicon nanocylinders onto the cell surfaces. Each nanocylinder is about 100 nanometers wide and exhibits an electromagnetic resonance that scatters a particular wavelength of light. The geometry of the nanocylinder determines which wavelength it scatters and can be fine-tuned to change the color of the solar cell. The imprint reduces the solar panel's efficiency by about 2 percent.

"In principle, this technique is easily scalable for fabrication technology," said Albert Polman, a scientific group leader at AMOLF and senior author on the paper. "You can use a rubber stamp the size of a solar panel that in one step, can print the whole panel full of these little, exactly defined nanoparticles."

[...] The nanopatterns also could be useful in making tandem solar cells, which stack several layers, each designed to absorb certain parts of the spectrum, to achieve efficiencies of greater than 30 percent.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Virindi on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:41AM (1 child)

    by Virindi (3484) on Wednesday August 16 2017, @02:41AM (#554533)

    Seems like a decent idea, but I am skeptical about the concept of white panels. The amount of energy being reflected would have to be pretty high for it to look white when illuminated with direct sunlight, and standard panels do not really collect much outside of visible light (there are many promises of course that "it is just around the corner!" and "we just have to figure out how to mass produce it", but we all know how that works).

    Given the emissions you get from sunlight, red or green might be decent choices though.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @12:23PM (#554677)

    Remember the atmosphere just happens to be pretty transparent at visible wavelengths (or, rather, our vision is adapted to wavelengths the atmosphere passes), but in the infrared, there's a bunch of absorption bands that cut out maybe 50% or so of the non-visible light, so there's even less energy available to those just-around-the-corner IR-collecting PV panels than you might think. In space it's a different story, of course, but in space nobody is concerned enough with aesthetics to pick white solar panels over efficient solar panels.