PARIS, Dec 16: Wearable solar panels that can be stuck to clothing, helping to charge mobile phones, music players or light batteries, are likely to come on sale within three years, the British weekly New Scientist says.
The panels will be pliable and cheap, because they can be mass-produced in rolls that can be cut as required and wrapped around clothes, fabrics, furniture and rooftops to convert light from the Sun into electricity, it says.
The innovation is the result of a three-nation research project backed by European Union (EU) subsidies for work into clean energy sources, with the Swedish-Dutch company Akzo-Nobel as one of the partners.
The basic technology is the same as that used for conventional solar panels, which are made of pairs of sheets of semi conducting silicon, doped with phosphorus and boron atoms.
The new panels are made the same way but, by using polymorphous silicon instead of crystalline silicon, the thickness is little more than photographic film - just one micrometre, up to 10 times thinner than conventional panels.
The yield is not so good, though. The best solar panels now have an energy efficiency of 20 percent, but the new cells are only about seven percent. Even so, this should be enough to add bendy solar panels to a jacket or rucksack to charge up a mobile phone during a walk, or to a tent fly sheet which will charge batteries all day so campers can have light all night, New Scientist says. -AFP
