Scientists have discovered a new way to assemble and repair solar cells which might someday lead to cheaper and longer lasting solar cells.
A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a new type of tiny solar cell which mimics the process that plants take in capturing solar energy. The new solar cells breakdown and reassemble themselves to better enable them to harness the destructive power of the sun, just as light-capturing proteins do in plants.
Plants break regularly breakdown their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun’s energy are, in effect, always brand new.
That process has now been imitated by Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and his team of graduate students and researchers. The team has now demonstrated that they too can mimic this process with their own tiny solar molecules, just a billionths of a metre wide, which reassemble themselves to extend their use.
They created a novel set of minute self-assembling molecules that can turn sunlight into electricity; the molecules can be repeatedly broken down and then reassembled quickly, just by adding or removing an additional solution. Their research is published in the September issue of Nature Chemistry.
Strano says the idea first occurred to him when he was reading about plant biology. “I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism,” he says. In full summer sunlight, “a leaf on a tree is recycling its proteins about every 45 minutes, even though you might think of it as a static photocell.”
Solar energy can be used to produce clean electricity which in turn could power our electric cars while reducing carbon emissions. As the moment solar energy is expensive and inefficient, but new techniques such as developed by MIT could be the key to better utilising powerful, abundant and environmentally-friendly solar energy.
