INNOVATIVE FABRICATION OF PAPER-PRINTED SOLAR CELLS

摘要

Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a cost-effective way of creating solar cells using vapour deposition method. They have demonstrated that a solar cell can be manufactured by depositing special inks on the paper. This technique is very inexpensive and can be performed on a commercial scale with very little modifications from the lab setup. There have been numerous ways introduced in the past to make the manufacturing of solar cells cheaper and easier, but all those methods exposed the substrates to demanding conditions usually in the form of liquids or extreme temperatures, which generally made the choice of the substrate very critical. But now, with this unique technique developed by MIT researchers, solar cells can be printed on an untreated paper, cloth, or plastic film just like printing a photo out of an inkjet printer. This is made possible by using a vapour deposition method, winch deposits the cells on to the substrate at a temperatures less than 120 degrees C (248 degrees F).