windows tagged posts

Imagine a car whose windows and sunroof can help top up its battery while parked under the sun, or a pair of smart glasses whose lenses can harvest light to power built-in electronics.

Such applications could become more feasible with a new type of ultrathin transparent solar cell developed by scientists from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore).

Led by Associate Professor Annalisa Bruno, the NTU researchers created perovskite solar cells that are about 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair and around 50 times thinner than conventional perovskite solar cells.

Despite their thinness, the devices ...

Luminescent solar concentrators serving as semitransparent photovoltaic windows could become an important element in net zero energy consumption buildings of the future. Photovoltaic hardware has to absorb light in order to work, and a typical silicon panel appears black. So, to put any of that hardware (and its supporting wiring) into a window that doesn’t block the view is rather challenging. One option is to use materials that only capture a part of the solar spectrum, but these tend to leave the light that enters the building with a distinctive tint.

The new hardware takes a very different approach. The entire window is filled with a diffuse cloud of quantum dots that absorb almost all of the solar spectrum...