Sun-Believable! Notre Dame Researchers Develop Paint That Generates Electricity!

Its Sun-Believable! This is what scientists from University of Notre Dame, Indiana are saying nowadays. Hinting of moving away from the present day Silicon based technology the team led by Prashant Kamat, John A. Zahm Professor of Science in Chemistry and Biochemistry and an investigator in #-Link-Snipped-# (NDnano) has developed a paint that produces electricity that can be tapped and utilized for domestic applications. However if you are thinking of buying this paint and applying on your electrical gadgets then you stand a chance of improving the efficiency of your gadgets.

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The team from Notre Dame University wanted utilize the unused materials for producing electricity. This has led to the #-Link-Snipped-# that can have a light-electricity conversion efficiency of around 1%. This might be 10 to 15 times less than what we achieve with silicon, but definitively there is scope for improvement.



The paint that the team came up with consists of nanoparticles that covert the #-Link-Snipped-# into electricity. The materials that the group used are the Titanium Dioxide (TiO2), Cadmium Selenide and Cadmium sulfide. The compounds of Cadmium were used along with Titanium Dioxide alternately to produce two different colors. When TiO2 was coated with Cadmium Sulfide, it produced a yellow paint while the Selenide alternative made a dark brown paint. Then the team converted this mixture to a paste by mixing it with water-alcohol combination. When this paste was tested experimentally it was found that it surely converted a tiny fraction of the Sunlight into electricity.

As far as the complete replacement of Silicon from Solar Energy generation is concerned, it is hard to say if it will be possible, but this electrical paint research would contribute to silicon gadget efficiency. It will be long time before we develop a non-conventional electricity generation system like this one.