Flexible Solar Sheet That Absorbs 95% Of Solar Energy

Patrick Pinhero, an associate professor in the Missouri University (MU) Chemical Engineering Department, is working on such flexible solar panels that can absorb as much as 95% of the incident solar energy and has planned to provide it to the consumers within coming five years.

Though the solar energy is luxuriously available all over the globe, it suffers from a couple of drawbacks that hinder the use of solar energy as the basic source for producing electricity. The obstacles include lower energy density, expensive initial investment cost and lower efficiency of the conversion process. The currently available solar panels convert nearly 20% of the incident energy into an equivalent amount of electrical energy. Patrick and his team were able to invent a solar panel that can boost up this efficiency almost up to 90%. The professor says that currently available solar panels reject most of the sun’s incident electromagnetic spectrum resulting into lower conversion efficiency.

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The new technology uses a thin sheet of moldable antennas called as nantenas that can sap the heat from industrial processes and convert it into equivalent electrical energy. The team has devised a way to sap electricity from the sunlight and heat collected using some special high-speed electrical circuitry. Currently though the solar panels are available in the market, wither they are very costly and beyond reach of everyone’s or the areas required to produce the required energy is so large that is not feasible to provide for the required space.

The new panels do not waste much of the incident solar energy and is able to absorb even the infra-red wavelengths and convert it into electrical energy by the photovoltaic method. As the nantenas absorb much of the incident light, the efficiency of the panels boosts up from 20% to 90%. This means that the same area of solar panels can yield you as much as 4 times more energy. Moreover the panels are flexible; hence the professor states that it can be implemented into roof shingle products or electrically powered vehicles. Prof. Patrick also dreams of use of this product into varied fields such as infra-red detection, optical computing, and infra-red line-of-sight telecommunications once he is granted enough funding. This advent is the solar electric power generation can prove to be a boon. It can help into depreciation in solar equipments’ costs and thus their penetration in the society.

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