Research Team Develops Transparent Solar Cells

Researchers at UCLA(University of California, Los Angeles) have made a transparent solar cell that is a step toward providing windows in homes and offices the ability to generate electricity.

The UCLA research team used a new kind of polymer solar cell that produces electricity by absorbing the infrared  light thus making the cell 70% transparent to the human eye. They manufactured the device using a photoactive plastic which converts infrared light to electricity.

“These results open the potential for visibly transparent polymer solar cells as add-on components of portable electronics, smart windows and building-integrated photovoltaics and in other applications,” said study leader Yang Yang, a UCLA professor of materials science and engineering.

Polymer solar cells have attracted great attention due to their advantages over competing solar cell technologies.Previously, many attempts have been made toward demonstrating visibly transparent or semitransparent PSCs. However, these demonstrations have most of the times either resulted in low transparency or low efficiency.

Another breakthrough is the transparent conductor made of a mixture of silver nanowire and titanium dioxide nanoparticles, which was able to replace the opaque metal electrode used in the past. This composite electrode also allows the solar cells to be fabricated economically by solution processing. This combination led to achieving  4% power-conversion efficiency for solution-processed and visibly transparent polymer solar cells.

"We are excited by this new invention on transparent solar cells, which applied our recent advances in transparent conducting windows (also published in ACS Nano) to fabricate these devices," said Paul S.Weiss