The creation of transparent solar panels (TSCs) will be an important step toward solving this problem and will allow solar technology to be integrated into our daily lives almost seamlessly. Imagine if every transparent glass surface contained a working solar cell - windows in residential and commercial buildings, car windows, and screens in personal electronics - the applications of transparent solar technology are diverse and plentiful worldwide and applicable.
The development of TSCs generally takes place in two ways. The first is to make solar cells using very thin films on the nanometer scale, which means that when you reduce the thickness of certain materials, the transparency of the material increases. In this method, multiple layers of materials are combined into a solar cell, similar to the manufacturing process for traditional silicon-based cells. However, the overall transparency of the solar cell can be increased by using extremely thin films for each layer. There are many different processes for the fabrication of conductive films and the deposition of these films on substrates, each of which has a different impact on the overall performance and cost of a solar cell.
Another approach is to use transparent materials that naturally allow visible light to pass through while absorbing light in the ultraviolet (UV) and near-infrared (NIR) spectrums, which are then used to generate electricity. This takes advantage of the fact that buildings with glass façades often already have coatings that filter some of the incident light in UV and IR frequencies to protect the occupants of the building from UV radiation and prevent overheating by IR radiation building. Instead of throwing this energy away, this type of transparent solar cell not only captures energy at invisible wavelengths but also converts it into usable electricity.
Many more promising technologies employ a combination of these two stacking techniques because the layers used to build solar cells are very thin, which increases their transparency, and the layers are chosen to also absorb NIR and/or UV radiation. There are a range of different materials that enable this phenomenon, including polymers, perovskites, quantum dots, and transparent light-emitting solar concentrators (TLSCs). In addition, organic dyes can be used as doping elements to increase the wavelength range and the number of absorbed photons, thereby increasing the number of electrons and holes produced. This improves the working efficiency of the solar cell.
Jiaxing Fuying Composite Materials Co., Ltd. is a transparent BIPV module factory in China. The company is committed to the research, application, production, and sales of BIPV solar panels.
