Solar Energy Articles

Solar Panels Have Possibility to be Printed Out?

In this article, we are going to read about a new generation of the solar panels, flexible in nature, viz. foldable solar panels. But these solar panels are very much different because they are the outcomes of the advanced form of research and development. Extensive research has led to the invention of the solar panels which can be so much flexible that they can be printed up on a sheet of paper.

The commercially available solar panels for residential installations are the cleanest and most elegant form of solar panels. But they are so much expensive to avail. Instead, the printed solar panels were invented by an MIT research student by the name of Miles Barr. It is true that the conventional solar panels are very much bulky and they require a proper installation process equipped with appropriate mounting techniques to install them. This generates a lot of expenses.

Hence science has made advancement. Now solar panels are available in such a flexible manner that they are just away from a single click to issue a print command. These are available at an industrial scale printing though. But these solar panels do not generate an amount of electricity which is equivalent to power a house. Rather, it can be used for much smaller applications like powering a radio or an alarm clock. They can be printed largely on a whole sheet of paper like a document and that too they can be availed cheaply world over.

These solar panels are just like an ordinary sheet of paper in appearance. A whole range of paper materials can be used to make use of these flexible solar panels. These can be printed paper, hardbound paper, tracing paper, tissue paper and even news paper.

The special thing however happens when the paper is put inside the solar printer. Inside a solar printer, a paper enters and goes through a vacuum chamber. They get heavily sprayed with the solar panel material made up of photovoltaic material. Then the mask of the shape of solar cells is deposited on the surface of the paper. Five such layers are applied one after the other. The outcome of the process is a printed sheet of paper which depicts the quality of the solar panel, with the solar cells aligned and arranged in the form of an interconnected array grid.

There are a lot of advantages that can be availed by the use of solar paper instead of the solar panels. The main advantage that can be availed is in terms of the cost. The solar panels that are traditionally available waste a lot of money on the materials which are used in the process of manufacturing. The substrate, glass covering, etc. serve as the very expensive products which when added to the solar panels increase the cost. It has been closely observed by the researchers that paper costs one-thousandth as much as glass sheet covering does for a given area.

Also, there is a use of very expensive chemicals which are deposited on to the substrate while a solar panel is fabricated at very high temperatures. The printer that is dedicatedly used for the paper solar panels is equipped with the chemicals which are cheaper because of its vapor deposition and they can also operate at lower temperatures of about 120 degree Celsius. Even though it is hot, it is nowhere compared to the generation of a temperature equivalent to 800 degree Celsius required by the traditional solar panels.

However, given its cost efficiency coupled with the advantages of using materials that are far less damaging to the environment compared to the traditional solar panels, it is very much evident that paper solar panels are the future for tomorrow's world. However, they do suffer from the drawbacks of generating only a small amount of power required for smaller appliances because these appliances can avail power from traditional batteries and also there is enough technology at our disposal to embed solar panels on to these electronics products.

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