New Development of Solar Panel

Traditional Solar Panel

Solar modules use light energy (photons) from the sun to generate electricity through the photovoltaic effect. The majority of modules use wafer-based crystalline silicon cells or thin-film cells based on cadmium telluride or silicon. Now the technology in making solar panel has new breakthrough.

New coating
American Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute researchers developed a new coating in 2008, which can raise the sunlight absorption rate to 96.2% when covered on a solar panel, while the ordinary one has it only at about 70%.
The new coating technology solves two major technical problems. One is to help solar panels to absorb full spectrum of sunlight. The other thing is to help the solar cell to absorb the sunlight at a wider angle, thereby improving the efficiency of the solar panels in absorbing sunlight.
Ordinary solar panels often absorb only part of the sunlight spectrum, and work efficiently only when it is perpendicular to the sun ray. That is why many solar energy installations are equipped with automatic adjustment system to ensure that the solar panels remain the most conducive angle to the absorption of the sun ray.

Plant material

On February 18, 2013, a Japanese research team developed a new type of solar panel that made of wood pulp as raw material. This "papered" solar cell is environmental friendly, inexpensive and ultra-thin as well as bendable flexible, which could be very promising and useful in the future. In order to ensure transparency, solar cell panel is usually made by transparent glass or plastic.
Dr. Masaya Nogi, the Associate Professor of Institute of Industrial Science, Osaka University, is the leader of a research team that successfully developed a transparent material of only 15 nanometers thick, with plant fiber in wood pulp as raw material, through the compression process, and then embed the organic photoelectric conversion materials and wiring with pressure, finally a paper solar cells is there.
Reportedly, the photoelectric conversion efficiency rate of papered solar cell is turned out to be only 3%, far less than the general power generation solar cell, whose conversion rate can reach 10%-20%. Though, the papered solar cell is almost of the same rate as the glass substrate solar cell. Besides, it is portable and easy to use, simple in manufacturing, of low cost. Developers want to make it a real in a few years.