You think you’ve seen it all, but you haven’t – at least regarding solar energy production! Nowadays, you can produce your own heat by just painting your house with the right kind of paint!
An innovative paint of this kind would do a lot more than just free up space on your roof by displacing the large solar panels: it would bring lots of money in your pockets, too. Thanks to researchers at University of Notre Dame in Indiana who came up with “Sun-Believable“, this paste could soon be sold in shops.
This “wonder” paste is filled with quantum dots (nanoparticles) for making up a different kind of solar cell. Other ingredients include titanium dioxide nanoparticles, to which cadmium sulfide or just cadmium and a water-alcohol suspension are added up.
This is not all: the entire process continues with the layering of the paint onto a transparent conductive material and its strengthening with a heat gun. The electrode surface thus resulted is attached to a graphene composite electrode with the help of an electrolyte solution. The resulting material produces electricity when placed under sunlight or any artificial light.
Now, don’t trample all over your spirits too hard, since “Sun-Believable” hasn’t been able to exceed a 1% conversion efficiency when tested, so it has no chance of competing against regular solar cells having 10 to 15% efficiency!
So much for covering your whole house with it!… Still – the paint doesn’t require a whole lot of funds to become mass-produced, so one can only pray for some ambitious-enough researchers to make it more effective.
[via PCWorld]
