Spray Paint with Solar Cells

In three to five years, having a solar panel might be as easy as spray painting your roof.

Spray-on solar ink is a concept developed by professor Brian Korgel and his research team of the University of Texas at Austin.

Korgel hopes the product will make solar more popular. Spray-on solar ink could draw consumers by being simpler and less expensive than the conventional silicon panels we use today.

“We’re coming up with a cheap way to make solar cells. Right now, the way they’re made is in expensive, vacuum processes, using high temperature,” Korgel said. “And what we’re trying to do is develop essentially an ink or a paint that you can simply spread on a substrate at room temperature or under a heat lamp that will then work as a solar cell.”

Korgel believes solution-based solar cells would have a significant impact on the consumer market. It would be more realistic for people to invest in solar technology because of the lower prices.

“What you’d be able to do now, it would make it more realistic to install solar panels on houses all over that would work,” Korgel said. “If people did that, you would change the way energy is used all over the world.”

The Korgel group makes their solar ink using a material called copper indium gallium selenide or CIGS. They’re nanoparticles that absorb sunlight and convert it into electricity. The system was featured in the journal American Chemical Society.

Korgel isn’t the only one experimenting with solar inks.

Som Mitra of the New Jersey Institute of Technology is beginning a similar journey, developing a solar ink material of his own. Mitra thinks the solution-based solar cells are the future. And in five years, it will be common to see painted solar cells on rooftops.

“There is absolutely no reason that it can’t be done,” Mitra said. “I think that the technology is there. If there is investment and interest, it can be done.” Mitra and his team takes a different method to create solar cells than Korgel.

Instead of the CIGS nanoparticles, the Mitra research team is working with a polymer, which generates an electrical charge. Then they use a carbon-nanotube composite to enhance the transport of electricity.

Korgel and Mitra both agree that there is increased interest in renewable energy. And that is a direct result of the rising cost of oil, among other nonrenewable resources.

“Having a source of energy that’s renewable, that you’re not digging it out of the ground . . . it’s pretty critical,” Korgel said. “And the neat thing about sunlight, it’s everywhere, you can go anywhere there’s daylight and have a source of energy . . . if you add up it can power the world’s energy needs many times over.”

However, before we’d see these products in stores, they’ll both need to increase their efficiency. In order for their inks to be commercialized, they must be able to covert more solar energy into power. Korgel and Mitra estimate their research will meet the requirement in the next three to five years.

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Tomeka Weatherspoon studies convergence journalism at the University of Missouri – Columbia. She creates news content for multiple platforms of media, including print, television, radio and online. Some of her work has appeared in The Columbia Missourian, KBIA/91.3 FM, kmov.com, and Perspectives magazine.