IT Home reported on January 6 that South Korean scientists have recently developed a new polymer material and successfully realized a stretchable organic solar cell. The best feature of this material is that the photoelectric conversion efficiency is maintained at 19% even when the tensile exceeds 40% of its original state.
This new conductive polymer has high photovoltaic properties and can be stretched like rubber. This newly developed polymer is expected to be a power source for the next generation of wearable electronics.
The project, led by Professor Bumjoon Kim, was developed by the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (CBE) at the Korea Advanced Institute of Technology (KAIST) and was published in joules last December.
Developers point out that with the rapid growth of the market for portable electric devices, flexible solar cells that can work and stretch at the same time are gaining traction as a power source.
Professor Kim's team found a solution and reported that they were the most efficient of their kind of elastic solar cells.
By chemically bonding a highly stretchable polymer with a conductive polymer with excellent electrical properties, the flexible solar cell is up to 19% efficient and tensile ten times more tensile than existing competitors. In fact, this photocell is able to increase its length by 40% and still work properly.
Prof. Kim shows:
Through this research, we have not only developed the world's most efficient stretchable organic solar cells, but more importantly, we have also developed a new polymer that can be used as a building block for a wide range of electronic devices that require malleability.
The address of the reference paper is attached
- Jin-Woo Lee, Heung-Goo Lee, Eun Sung Oh, Sun-Woo Lee, Tan Ngoc-Lan Phan, Sheng Li, Taek-Soo Kim, Bumjoon J. Kim. Rigid- and soft-block-copolymerized conjugated polymers enable high-performance intrinsically stretchable organic solar cells. Joule, 2023