UNDERSTANDING A PRINTED TEXT
| Interwoven solar cells turn T-shirt into a power textile
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| Forget about Google Glass or the latest smart watch announcements – the future will belong to electronic textiles (e-textiles) that will allow the design and production of a new generation of garments with built-in unobtrusive sensors and a variety of electronic functions. Such e-textiles will have the revolutionary ability to sense, act, store, emit, and move – think biomedical monitoring functions or new man-machine interfaces – while ideally leveraging an existing low-cost textile manufacturing infrastructure.
All these wearable and potentially textile-embedded electronic gadgets will require power; and it wouldn't make sense to have to plug your sleek flexible sleeve display into a bulky lithium-ion battery brick. Today, we look at recent developments that would actually allow your T-shirt to generate power from its interwoven solar cell wires.
Researchers in China have developed a novel efficient wire-shaped polymer solar cell by incorporating a thin layer of titania nanoparticles between the photoactive material and electrode.
The aligned carbon nanotube fiber enabled high flexibility and stability of the resulting polymer solar cell. These miniature polymer solar cell wires, when woven into textiles, can serve as a power source.
The researchers found that the titania nanoparticle enhance the adsorption of photoactive materials and charge transport, which increased the energy conversion efficiency by 36% compared with the wire-shaped polymer solar cell without the titania nanoparticle under the same condition.
According to the researchers, the nanocrystalline semiconductor oxide layer played a crucial role in providing pathways for charge transport.
In addition, the nanoparticle layer effectively increases the polymer load, decreases the electrical resistance for charge transport, and enhances light scattering.
The researchers found that the diameters of multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) fibers affect the wire-shaped polymer solar cells (PSC) to a large degree. The energy conversion efficiencies were increased from 0.72% to 1.78% with the increasing diameters from 18 to 32 µm and then decreased with the further increasing diameters (e.g., 1.47% and 1.18% at 60 and 74 µm, respectively).
The maximal efficiency occurred at approximately 32 µm.
A smaller fiber produced a higher electric resistance with a lower current density, while a bigger fiber shaded the incident sunlight also to decrease the current density.
The team tested the wire-shaped PSCs for flexibility and bendability and, even after 1000 bending cycles, found no obvious damages or decreased energy conversion efficiencies.
The as-prepared wire-shaped PSC could be easily woven into various flexible structures such as textiles without the necessity for sealing that had been required by the widely studied wire-shaped dye-sensitized solar cells.
Going forward, the researchers will work on increasing the performance of their wire-shaped polymer solar cells and also, in addition to bendability, make them stretchable.
(http://www.nanowerk.com/spotlight/spotid=35064.php)
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