Finding and using alternative energy sources is quickly becoming a must and one obstacle to overcome is how to make solar panels easier to incorporate into building projects. This, of course, involves making them look pretty. VTT Technical Centre of Finland has gone a step further in this. They have come up with a method that allows for the printing of decorative graphics and functional components onto flexible organic solar panels.
A new Kickstarter campaign is aiming to raise funds to build a device, which will be capable of harvesting safe drinking water from the air. The Warka Water, as it is called is an off-the-grid bamboo tower, which could, according to the developers, collect an annual average of 26.4 US gallons of water per day. This would make it ideal for deployment in undeveloped regions of Africa and elsewhere, which is what they are planning on doing.
Wakati is an innovative little machine, which is capable of providing sterilized storage for fruit and vegetables, keeping them from spoiling in hot climates. This product is aimed at farmers in developing countries who do not have regular access to electricity and therefore refrigerators, meaning that a large portion of the food they produce goes to waste. To fight this problem, the Wakati is capable of operating on solar power.
A lot of effort has gone into developing transparent solar cells lately, since they could be attached to windows easily with no loss of light. But CSEM, a Swiss non-profit technology company, has now developed white solar cells, which can easily be integrated into a building’s walls.
Researchers at the University of Toronto have come up with a new kind of spray-on colloidal quantum dots (CQD), which is a breakthrough in the field as it doesn’t bind with oxygen atoms. The later is a problem with CQD as it causes some dots to forgo their electrons and become useless. Tests of this new method revealed a solar efficiency of eight percent, which may be low compared to other technologies, but the researchers are still hopeful their method will prove very useful.
A team of researchers at the Ohio State University (OSU) successfully produced a dye-sensitized solar cell, which can store power by using air to decompose and re-form lithium peroxide. This device combines a solar cell and battery into one, and it is the first device of its kind. The adoption of this technology could also considerably lower the costs of solar cells.
