Scientific Reports: Peel-and-Stick: Fabricating Thin Film Solar Cell on Universal Substrates

http://www.nature.com/srep/2012/121220/srep01000/full/srep01000.html

Fabrication of thin-film solar cells (TFSCs) on substrates other than Si and glass has been challenging because these nonconventional substrates are not suitable for the current TFSC fabrication processes due to poor surface flatness and low tolerance to high temperature and chemical processing. Here, we report a new peel-and-stick process that circumvents these fabrication challenges by peeling off the fully fabricated TFSCs from the original Si wafer and attaching TFSCs to virtually any substrates regardless of materials, flatness and rigidness. With the peel-and-stick process, we integrated hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) TFSCs on paper, plastics, cell phone and building windows while maintaining the original 7.5% efficiency. The new peel-and-stick process enables further reduction of the cost and weight for TFSCs and endows TFSCs with flexibility and attachability for broader application areas. We believe that the peel-and-stick process can be applied to thin film electronics as well.

Ev charging at Mc Donald's Part 2

Ev charging at Mc Donald's

Indian-American student develops a capacitor than can charge cellphone in 20 seconds.

http://www.techlife360.com/2013/05/Indian-american-Eesha-Khare-cellphone-charging-news.html

Indian-American student develops a capacitor than can charge cellphone in 20 seconds.

An Eighteen year old Indian-American teenage girl Eesha Khare from Saratoga, California, invented a super capacitor that can charge cell phone in 20-30 seconds. 

This super charger can be installed inside the cell phone battery. According to Eesha, this technology can handle 10,000 charge/recharge cycles, while most modern battery only can handle 1000 charge /recharge cycles. And also have many advantages over current batteries.

So far this new technology is only been tested on LED light, and also it have a great chances to work with other devices like cellphones and also flexible environmentslike bendable displays, fabrics and clothing's.

The project is named as "Design and Synthesis of Hydrogenated TiO2-Polyaniline Nanorods for Flexible High-Performance Supercapacitors." For this project she was awarded $50,000 by Intel Foundation-Young Scientist Award.

Big players like Google has been already contacted with her, she not yet revealed any details about that.

Patent filing claims solar energy ‘breakthrough’ | McClatchy

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/05/08/190683/patent-filing-claims-solar-energy.html#.UYwmsRpZ5Kd