This is a guess post from Sophia H. Walker. Sophia writes for the solar panel battery charger blog, her personal hobby website focused on tips to help people save energy using solar powered energy for small instruments. Feel free to go over and visit her blog for the latest on where cordless technology is headed.

Flexible transparent carbon atom films or Graphene for short!

College of southern California researchers reveal us a more useful use of graphene photovoltaics

Is it possible to imagine people powering their mobile phone or music/video device while jogging in the sun?

A University of Southern California team has produced flexible transparent carbon atom films that may have great potential for a new breed of solar cells.

Inside a paper recently published in the journal ACS Nano, researchers stated that organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells have been proposed as a way to create affordable energy due to their ease of manufacture, light-weight, and compatibility with flexible substrates.

This work indicates that graphene, a highly conductive and highly transparent kind of carbon consisting of atoms-thick sheets of carbon atoms, has high potential to fill this role.

While graphene’s existence has been known for decades, it has only been studied extensively since 2004 because of the difficulty of manufacturing it in high quality and in quantity.

The University of southern California team has produced graphene/polymer sheets ranging in sizes up to 150 square centimeters that in turn may be used to create dense arrays of flexible organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells.

These organic photovoltaic (OPV) devices convert solar radiation to electricity, but not as efficiently as silicon cells.

The energy provided by sunlight on a sunny day is approximately 1,000 watts per meter square, for every 1,000 watts of sunlight that hits a square meter part of the standard silicon solar cell, 14 watts of electricity will be generated, Organic solar cells are less efficient; their conversion rate for that same 1,000 watts of sunlight in the graphene-based solar cell would be only 1.3 watts.

But what graphene organic photovoltaic (OPV) lack in efficiency, can potentially be compensated by its lower price and, greater physical flexibility.

Researchers think it can eventually be possible to cover with inexpensive solar cell layers extensive areas like newspapers, magazines or power generating clothing.

Ultracapacitors

In the meanwhile Prof. Ruoff and his colleagues of the mechanical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin, are studying the basic science in the introduction of graphene-based ultracapacitors for usage in electronics and other fields.

Prof. Ruoff says batteries are relatively slow, they can store energy but take a while to charge up, and then they distribute energy slowly, over time.

Ultracapacitors can be charged very quickly, in seconds, and discharge in a short time, but, today, they’re not able to store very much electrical energy.

The development of stable and less costly ultracapacitors is seen as a key step in using wind or solar-generated power, especially if researchers can find approaches to enable capacitors to store energy longer, which is not yet possible.

Even with their current storage capacity, the graphene devices could provide quick energy when needed in certain situations on the green way.

They may be used, as an example, to absorb heat generated in braking a vehicle or train, and store it for a short time, and use it for the electrical needs of the vehicle (i.e. starting the automobile or acceleration)

The author – Sophia H. Walker writes for the solar panel battery charger blog, her personal hobby website focused on tips to help people save energy using solar powered energy for small instruments.