Spray-on Solar Power

New technique offers spray-on solar power can turn your entire roof a giant solar panel and powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap.

Dr. Illan Kramer of The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces. They do so by using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)—a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

Dr. Illan Krame, said:

“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof.

This is something you can build in a Junkyard Wars fashion, which is basically how we did it. We think of this as a no-compromise solution for shifting from batch processing to roll-to-roll.”

Professor Ted Sargent (ECE), vice dean, research in the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering at University of Toronto and Kramer’s supervisor, said:

“As quantum dot solar technology advances rapidly in performance, it’s important to determine how to scale them and make this new class of solar technologies manufacturable. We were thrilled when this attractively manufacturable spray-coating process also led to superior performance devices showing improved control and purity.”