SOLAR SHEET THAT CAPTURES 90% OF AVAILABLE SUNLIGHT!!!...

A team of researchers led by Patrick Pinhero, associate professor in the chemical engineering department at the University of Missouri, ahs developed a flexible solar sheet that captures more than 90 per cent of available light.

Traditionally, solar powered devices suffer from a two-fold problem.  First, they have difficulty converting the light they capture to electricity.  Second, they only capture a small band of wavelengths out of the wide range of wavelengths found in sunlight striking the Earth.  Improving in either area can offer gains to the net power output (and efficiency) of a solar cell.

Researchers at the University of Missouri are claiming a breakthrough in the second category.  They claim [press release] to have developed a device that can capture 90 percent of sunlight, versus the 20 percent that current photovoltaic (PV) panels capture.

The device use NANTENNA which is a thin, mouldable sheet of small antennae that can harvest the heat from industrial processes and turn it into usable electricity. Since it can absorb infrared radiation, the material has the capacity to capture more than 90% of the available sunlight compared to the traditional photovoltaic cells which absorb only 20% of the wavelength. The researchers aim to extend this concept to a direct solar-facing nantenna device capable of collecting solar irradiation in the near infrared and optical regions of the solar spectrum.

Professor Pinhero is working to port the resulting device to a mass-producable design.  He's currently securing U.S. Department of Energy funding and money from private investors to accomplish this.  To that end, he's enlisted the help of Dennis Slafer of MicroContinuum, Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., a solar power and alternative energy firm.

"Our overall goal is to collect and utilize as much solar energy as is theoretically possible and bring it to the commercial market in an inexpensive package that is accessible to everyone," Professor Pinhero states.  "If successful, this product will put us orders of magnitudes ahead of the current solar energy technologies we have available to us today."