In the future, if you want to charge your smartphone, in addition to a wireless charging environment such as a wireless network, electric shoes that encourage you to exercise more, you can also use inkjet printed plastic solar cells, as long as there is light, you can absorb energy. And the application range is more diverse, such as your T-shirt, backpack, home curtains, etc. can be printed on the battery. Experts from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany also said that the use of inkjet printing to produce solar cell panels is arguably the cheapest technology at present.

French start-up solar company DraculaTechnologies is developing a decal solar cell composed of a unique conductive plastic that can capture energy from outdoor sunlight or indoor artificial light. This company was the peak of "2017HelloTomorrow" held in Paris, France last month One of the award-winning companies.

Traditional solar panels mostly use silicon crystal materials to capture solar energy. According to the silicon-based solar cells currently developed in the laboratory (non-silicon air batteries), the efficiency of monocrystalline silicon cells is 25.0%, and the efficiency of polycrystalline silicon cells is 20.4%. The efficiency of CIGS thin-film batteries reaches 19.8%, the efficiency of CdTe thin-film batteries reaches 19.6%, and the efficiency of amorphous silicon thin-film batteries is 10.1%.

The DraculaTechnologies team is developing a conductive plastic that can capture more wavelength ranges. The technology is called "LAYER" (LightasYourEnergy), which consists of 5 layers of surface printing: the center is the photoactive layer, and the sides are covered by semiconductor chips. , To help the conductive color ink printed on the outermost layer to extract charge. Scientist SadokBenDkhil said that the silicon material that mainly absorbs direct light cannot beat the range of this conductive material to capture energy, and the thin film battery has the advantages of light weight, non-toxic, foldable, low cost and so on.

At present, they can print a rectangular battery module with a length and width of about 5 cm in 1 hour. Any color and shape can be customized (including transparent). Materials physicist Sadok Ben Dkhil said in an interview with "newscientist" that this It means that you can print this thin film battery on a T-shirt or backpack with a larger exposure area, and then charge your mobile phone by other methods (but the details of how to operate, the company has not talked about it), or directly transparent The battery is integrated into the phone design.

Scientist YuhangLiu from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne was very impressed with this application. He pointed out that plastic panels can also be incorporated into home curtains to provide electricity for small appliances such as lamps or air fresheners. In addition to small appliances, the team also plans to use this battery to drive sensors that require a small amount of power to monitor the temperature and humidity of the building.

The ultimate goal of DraculaTechnologies is to print square solar cell panels with a length and width of 30 cm. Although they also admit that it will take a few months to develop a panel that can fully charge the power of a smartphone, but researchers are looking to shorten the solar cell. For the charging time method, they believe that this technology can be applied in the real world.