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Making your life greener - one bite at a time.

Sounds a tad out there, but a new manufacturing process that creates hairy solar cells could mean more efficient solar cells.

So how does it work? In reality, the hairs are visible only on the microscopic level and they are actually nanowires, tiny silicon or metallic structures used in completing very small circuits.

The UC San Diego hairy solar cell research is not unsimilar to a German project announced last week by a consortium of German universities working in concert with Harvard’s Science department.

Scientists at UC San Diego were able to grow nanowires directly on an inexpensive indium tin oxide conductive surface. The nanowires were then coated with an organic polymer. The German project bonds their nanowires with spun glass.

So how small are these hairs. Using the electron microscope photograph as a guide - there are 1000 nanograms per microgram - 1000 micrograms to one milligram and 1000 milligrams to one gram...get the picture!

The idea is both research project is the same. They use nanowires to more efficiently conduct electrons from the collection surface of the solar cell to an electrode. Contemporary thin-film solar cells provide no direct conduit for electron travel.

If the process scales well, it has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency of next-generation solar photovoltaic panels.

“If nanowires are going to be used massively in photovoltaic devices, then the growth mechanism of nanowires on arbitrary metallic surfaces is an issue of great importance,” said Paul Yu, a professor at UC San Diego, and a member of the project team which published the nanowire research. “We contributed one approach to growing nanowires directly on metal.”

Will this bring us closer to a sun powered future?
There are still some engineering challenges to be traversed before UC San Diego’s new process could be brought to market. One is the durability of the polymer layer, which currently degrades when exposed to air. It’s possible that the German group’s spun-glass method may prove more commercially attractive.

But “hairy” solar cells could represent a significant advance in photovoltaic energy technology. That might lead to smaller, cheaper, easier-to-deploy solar panels a few years down the line  and bring us a bit closer to a sun-powered future we need.