Print Your Own Solar Cells – Soon!

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NJIT Professor Somenath Mitra
NJIT Professor Somenath Mitra

We’ll soon be able to print our own solar cells, thanks to a technology developed by a team of U.S. scientists at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The solar cells can be printed by inkjet printers that we use at home and the finished product can then be slapped onto rooftops, walls or billboards to create power stations.

The inexpensive process of making solar cells was developed by a team headed by NJIT Professor Somenath Mitra.

The process uses cheaper and simpler organic solar cells from polymers, instead of the expensive purified silicon in use at present.

The technology’s name however is not that simple, “Fullerene single wall carbon nanotube complex for polymer bulk heterojunction photovoltaic cells.” Look it up in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Journal of Materials Chemistry.

[Site: NJIT.edu]
Photo: NJIT

Published by Chris Malinao

Chris teaches Lightroom as workflow software to photography students at the FPPF, Federation of Philippine Photographers Foundation. He also teaches smartphone photography.