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The ultralight solar cells are made of semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.

A group of engineers at MIT have developed a rather interesting solution to be deployed in remote locations or for assistance in emergencies: solar cells made of ultralight fabric that can turn any surface into a power source.

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It features cutting-edge solar panels and wind turbines.

Do you have a high-rise building that needs renewable power? PowerNEST is the only rooftop renewable energy system that can fully power a medium-to a high-rise building, according to its official website.

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MIT engineers have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.

These durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies. They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, generate 18 times more power-per-kilogram, and are made from semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.

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Outshining conventional solar cells

When they tested the device, the MIT researchers found it could generate 730 watts of power per kilogram when freestanding and about 370 watts-per-kilogram if deployed on the high-strength Dyneema fabric, which is about 18 times more power-per-kilogram than conventional solar cells.

A Dyson Sphere is a megastructure that has not yet been built. Scientists conceive of it as a giant shell that encloses the sun.

Hypothetically, the Dyson Sphere will be lined with mirrors and solar panels that will collect the energy from the sun. This would be an unimaginable amount of energy.

In theory, the Dyson Sphere would be large enough that it could be a habitable place for humans and it would act as an artificial biosphere in the case that Earth’s supplies have dwindled. It would be a way to ensure survival for the human race.

Researchers in the CEST group have published a study demonstrating the effectiveness of machine learning methods to identify suitable perovskite solar cell materials. Perovskite solar cells are a novel technology gathering a lot of interest due to their high efficiency and potential for radically lower manufacturing costs when compared to the traditional silicon-based solar cells.

Despite their promising qualities, the commercialization of perovskite solar cells has been held back by their fast degradation under environmental stresses, such as heat and moisture. They also contain toxic substances that can negatively impact the environment. The search for new perovskite materials that do not have these problems is ongoing, but the established experimental and computational research methods have not been able to handle the high number of material candidates that need to be tried and tested.

CEST members Jarno Laakso and Patrick Rinke, with collaborators from University of Turku and China, developed new machine learning-based methodology for rapidly predicting perovskite properties. This new approach accelerates computations and can be used to study perovskite alloys. These alloy materials contain many candidates for improved solar cell materials, but studying them has been difficult with conventional computational methods.

Over the past few decades, engineers and material scientists have created increasingly advanced and efficient solar technologies. Some of these technologies are based on photovoltaics with a so-called heterojunction structure, which entails the integration of two materials with distinct optoelectronic properties.

Researchers at Technische Universität Dresden have recently realized a different type of solar cells, referred to as phase heterojunction (PHJ) solar cells. These cells, introduced in a paper published in Nature Energy, were fabricated using two polymorphs (i.e., structural forms) of the same material, the perovskite CsPbI₃, instead of two entirely different semiconductors.

“The realization of a PHJ requires the ability to fabricate two different phases of the same perovskite composition on top of each other,” Yana Vaynzof, lead author of the paper, told TechXplore. “While the fabrication of CsPbI₃ perovskite by solution-processing is well established in the literature, we needed to develop a method to deposit a perovskite without dissolving the underlying layer, so we decided to use thermal evaporation for this purpose.”

You heard that right, it’s time to cool down the solar farms a bit.

It’s a common belief that a solar panel produces more energy on receiving more sunlight but that’s not always true. In fact, a report from the World Economic Forum state that photovoltaic cells on a solar panel (that trap sunlight and convert it into electricity) may start producing less energy if they get overheated.

A new study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Utah (UU), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Portland State University (PSU), sheds more light on this rarely discussed aspect of solar panels. It mentions that the efficiency of a solar plant goes down by 0.5 percent.

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Microscopy data suggest that degradation starts from grain boundaries and propagates inwards.