Can you imagine inexpensive solar cells? Do you picture yourself looking in newspaper the latest videos of the news? Or commenting on a book under the cover of it? If Brian Korgel, chemical engineer at the University of Texas at Austin is successful, we may be seeing this progress in the very near future.

The revolutionary idea behind is to produce inexpensive solar cells using nanoparticle inks that allow printing so as not unlike printed newspapers, or allow graffiti on some walls of buildings or on their rooftops. This is to bring cost down to a tenth of this month, thanks to the replacement of a standard process for the manufacture of solar cells that require high temperatures and is relatively expensive.

Importantly, the sun, especially in our country provides almost limitless energy source, but current technologies for capturing solar energy are prohibitively expensive and can not compete with fossil fuels. The inks could be printed on a roll to roll process on a substrate of plastic or stainless steel. And the prospect of ink painting the roof or a wall of a building, it seems feasible. Thanks to the nanostructures allow the absorption of light to make functional plates 10,000 times thinner than a hair.

Something that is not clear is whether the conversion efficiency would be higher than today. But leaving aside this aspect, entire buildings could be painted with the ink which provide enough energy for fossil fuels a thing of the past. And, as mentioned earlier, only with the ink printed in the newspapers, it would provide enough energy to transmit information from traditional media to the red and vice versa.

Viewed in SciTech.