[font face=Serif]Print ⎙ December 5, 2014 | Marit Mitchell
[font size=5]New technique offers spray-on solar power[/font]
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My dream is that one day youll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof, says Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow with the Ted Sargent group in The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto, and IBM Canadas Research and Development Centre.
Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplanes wing. A surface the size of your cars roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-Watt light bulbsor 24 compact fluorescents.
Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processingan 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.
In a third paper in the journal
ACS Nano, Kramer and his colleagues used a Blue Gene/Q supercomputer owned by the Southern Ontario Smart Computing Innovation Platform (SOSCIP) to model how and why the sprayed CQDs perform just as well asand in some cases better thantheir batch-processed counterparts. SOSCIP is an R&D consortium consisting of 11 southern Ontario universities and the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre. This work was supported by the IBM Canada Research and Development Centre, and by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.[/font][/font]