Tuesday, December 09, 2014: Researchers have found out a new way towards making spray cells onto flexible surfaces in a way to make them easy and cheap to manufacture. The new system involves a SprayLD, which spreads a liquid containing minuscule light-sensitive materials termed as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) straight away onto the flexible surfaces like film or plastic.
These solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film are viable for a variety of weirdly shaped surfaces ranging from patio furniture to an airplane’s wing. For instance, a surface equivalent to the size of a car’s roof, if covered with CQD-coated film is capable of producing enough power that three 100-Watt light bulbs or 24 compact fluorescents can produce.
Up till now, only batch processing was used to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces, perhaps was considered as to be an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. Whereas, the sprayLD method on other hand, can be used over flexible materials without any major loss caused to the efficiency of the solar cell.
