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| Tiny indoor solar panel |
Researchers at the University of Queensland have built more sustainable and eco-friendly indoor solar panels that could one day power your gadgets and other electronics at home and in the office using any kind of light you already have indoors. Examples of this indoor-captured light include LEDs, office lighting, and even the glow in your living room at night.
The electricity generated from this source could be used to power your wearables, phones, laptops, sensors, doorbells, alarms, and other small electronics. Led by UQ’s Dr Miaoqiang Lyu and Professor Lianzhou Wang, the research team gets rid of toxic lead and other hazardous solvents in perovskite indoor solar panels using a newly developed fabrication method.
Perovskite is a versatile class of materials featuring a unique crystal structure (typically ABX₃) that is revolutionising solar energy. These materials are known for their high efficiency, low-cost production, flexibility and light weight and can be tailored to a variety of optoelectronic applications such as high-performance solar cells and LED devices.
So, the idea the researchers are working with is not something new. Indoor solar cells have existed for a while, but they haven’t been very efficient. Typical silicon versions tend to top out at about 10 per cent efficiency, and this puts a limit on their usefulness. At the same time, it is worth mentioning that most of the perovskite solar cells use lead and toxic chemicals in the manufacturing process, which is not the best if you are considering environmental safety.
But it’s a material that’s been getting lots of attention as a possible replacement for silicon — mostly because it can convert light to electricity more efficiently — so it’s hard to overlook. What the researchers are doing differently now is they have developed a vapour-based method that completely bypasses the hazardous solvents. The result is a lead-free perovskite solar cell that still performs impressively, reaching a power conversion efficiency of 16.36 per cent under indoor lighting.
Could this mean the end of small batteries?
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| Tiny coin-cell and button batteries |
The solar panels are now being explored as potential replacements for tiny coin-cell and button batteries in low-power electronics.Coin-cell and button batteries are small, round, single-cell batteries shaped like thin cylinders or discs, designed to power compact electronic devices like watches, hearing aids, and remote controls. So, in a real-world sense, these panels could power low-powered devices like phones, wearables, DC fans, and health monitors.
In fact, one of the first places you may see this technology in action is in supermarkets where battery-powered electronic shelf labels – the digital price tags which eliminate the use of thousands of paper price tags – are already being tested to cut down on manual work.
The panels are thin and flexible and can be adapted in shape so that they can be incorporated relatively easily into a wide range of products. But before they get to consumer devices, there is one big problem to solve: durability. The team is now looking at ways to encapsulate the material, so it will not be affected by moisture and oxygen, which can degrade performance over time.
If that step goes as expected, the timeline could be shockingly quick. Dr Lyu said perovskite indoor solar panels and the devices that depend on them could start to hit the market in several years. If they could do more than just make gadgets more convenient, they could help cut down on battery waste, a rapidly growing environmental concern linked to small electronics. That’s an awfully bright prospect for a technology that runs on something as mundane as room light.
