New Technique Offers Spray on Solar Power

Spray-on solar power...........What? This sounds way cool, ATS. A researcher named Iilan Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow with The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and IBM Canada's Research and Development Centre has developed this new technology which allows one to "spray" Solar Sensitive CQDs onto a flexible film which can then be wrapped on any surface..Wow!

Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplane's wing. A surface the size of your car's roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-Watt light bulbs—or 24 compact fluorescents.
He calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.
Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing—an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler. In two recent papers in the journals Advanced Materials and Applied Physics Letters, Kramer showed that the sprayLD method can be used on flexible materials without any major loss in solar-cell efficiency.

This sounds way cool, huh ATS? Maybe this technology can be used for next generation cyborgs to power themselves, maybe something else....What does ATS think?

Read more at: phys.org...

phys.org...

a reply to: lostbook

Who's process did they re-brand this from I wonder??? I seem to remember that in 1997, the university at Trenton, New Jersey had a similar process for OLED spray-on deposition on thin films (or pretty much any surface).

Cheers - Dave

a reply to: lostbook

Absolutely brilliant, now watch it get snapped up and shelved by some mega corporation.

originally posted by: LABTECH767
a reply to: lostbook

Absolutely brilliant, now watch it get snapped up and shelved by some mega corporation.

That was my first thought.........This idea will never get to market.......But now, strangely enough, I think it might make it.

About a year or two ago someone came out with an printer ink for solar panels. Took the cost down to about 1 or 2 cents per A4 sheet of solar panel. The technical answers are around, but as for the political answers it does seam to be a bit trickier.

Yep, a few years ago...they announced a pair of Canadians had invented solar paint......never heard about it since....are they both dead???maybe....

originally posted by: LABTECH767
Absolutely brilliant, now watch it get snapped up and shelved by some mega corporation.

Didn't you notice the "IBM Canada" in the article?

IBM is known for being the biggest "patent producer" every year, but things like the "holographic data storage system" that was said to be near "ready for market" in 1999 never appeared.

Huh, maybe this time it will "stick".

a reply to: ArMaP

Getting a crude proof of concept working in the lab and getting something actually usable, manufacturable and cost effective are two entirely different worlds. Just look at graphene. Lots of cool research into the applications but until some bright spark figures out a way to mass produce it it's going to stay in the lab and go no further.

Anyway, these "just wait for [corporate boogeyman of your choice] to suppress it" comments that hit these threads like clockwork are such a tired old lazy cliche and show a lack of understanding of the difference between conceptual work in the lab, scaling things up for mass production and the shoddy sensationalist reporting of science news in the media. Most of the time these things just don't work out beyond novel lab experiments. No grand conspiracy here.

a reply to: ArMaP

As I remember Grundig were behind a holographic transparrent crystal storage medium they were actually developing from the mid 80's, dunno maybe IBM bought there patent or it was a similar but different technology.
You know why of course, hard drive's with there moving part's and eventual mechanical failure would have been obsolete with small crystal cube's or in the case of the grundig concept tear drop pendant's having absolutley huge storage potential even with the laser write and read technology available back then and of course though slower than memory chips they would also have larger potential than even modern SSD's.

This thread needs a lot more attention. Are they planning on burying this?

a reply to: Unity_99

This story has been going around for years. There's still MAJOR design problems to be fixed (e.g. no way to draw power from it yet). That is the reason it hasn't taken off, not because "they" (whatever bogeyman you believe in) are suppressing it. As it stands, it's just the one of the many novel threads that come and go that, in all likelihood, will not reach fruition.