Stretchy solar cells a step closer

Organic solar cells that can be painted or printed on surfaces are increasingly efficient, and now show promise for incorporation into applications like clothing that also require them to be flexible.

The Rice University lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Rafael Verduzco has developed flexible organic photovoltaics that could be useful where constant, low-power generation is sufficient.

The research appears in the American Chemical Society journal Chemistry of Materials.

Organic solar cells rely on carbon-based materials including polymers, as opposed to hard, inorganic materials like silicon, to capture sunlight and translate it into current. Organics are also thin, lightweight, semitransparent and inexpensive. While middle-of-the-road, commercial, silicon-based solar cells perform at about 22 percent efficiency—the amount of sunlight converted into electricity—organics top out at around 15 percent.

Thiol molecules drive gold atoms to form a forest of nanowires with useful properties

Adjustments to sulfur-containing molecules have enabled researchers to precisely control the growth of gold nanowires, which are potentially useful in various applications including biosensors and catalysis.

Ligand molecules are used to prevent nanostructures from growing too large, or forming unwanted shapes. Suzhu Yu of the A*STAR Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology and colleagues had previously found that sulfur-containing molecules called thiols, which bind to gold, could be used to grow very thin gold nanowires. Now they have investigated how exactly these thiols do their job, and shown that different types of thiols can fine-tune the shape and size of the nanowires.

The researchers attached gold particles a few nanometers wide to a wafer of silicon, and then dipped this assembly into a solution containing a gold compound, a thiol ligand, and a reducing agent that generated gold atoms. When they used a ligand called 4-mercaptobenzoic acid (4-MBA), the nanoparticles sprouted a forest of gold nanowires that were 6 nanometers across and about 1 micrometer long in 15 minutes (see image).

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