Solar Fabric

Solar cell fabric is poised to change the face of wearable electronics. Imagine keeping your smartphone charged, or tracking your fitness and activity levels, just by wearing a certain textile — and without having to carry along a charger cord.

The Challenges of Creating Wearable Solar Cell Fabric

Normally, photovoltaic panels are made of glass or another rigid material, which isn’t exactly practical for clothing. Consequently, researchers have worked to create a functional solar cell component that is flexible and breathable.

Photovoltaic cells must be pliable to be integrated successfully into a textile. Otherwise, bending the fabric would cause their seals to break, destroying their ability to harvest light energy from the sun.

In addition, solar fabric must incorporate battery storage. Without it, as soon as the textile is no longer exposed to the sun, it will stop providing power. Batteries also must be flexible, rechargeable and inexpensive to be practical for a mass market photovoltaic textile.

New Textile Creates Power from Solar Cells and Mechanical Energy

The latest photovoltaic textile technology combines two different polymer fibers, both of which are lightweight and low-cost.

One component is a fiber coated with several chemical elements and compounds. Among them is zinc oxide, a photovoltaic material, which is woven together with copper wire. Essentially, this embeds the fiber with tiny solar cells that can capture ambient light.

The second component is made of copper-coated polytetrafluoroethylene strips along with more copper wire, materials that generate mechanical energy or electricity from friction.

As for solar fabric battery storage, scientists have found that polyester yarn coated with nickel and carbon combined with polyurethane can produce a flexible battery that continues to work even when repeatedly bent and folded.

The Future of Solar Cell Fabric

At the moment, solar cell textiles are still in the testing phase. Researchers have successfully demonstrated that the materials can produce power by integrating them into many different fabric items, including clothing, curtains and tents.

These convenient, wearable electronics that use photovoltaic power aren’t on the market yet, but in the meantime, you can keep your smartphone charged up with a portable photovoltaic device.

Mobile chargers can give you enough juice for one or more charges, depending upon the model. Or go a bit bigger — and have more photovoltaic power for other small electronics — with a portable solar kit.

Solar cell fabric may not be available yet, but affordable residential and commercial photovoltaic systems are. 

We look forward to helping you learn more about today’s cutting-edge solar technologies.

Solar energy is becoming ever more widespread, with panels going up not only on houses and office buildings, but on cars, buses, and road signs. The latest advancement in solar technology will put solar energy on another new and somewhat unexpected surface: people. Not directly on us, though—on our clothes.

Scientists are developing wearable energy-smart ribbons that can be woven into fabric, with miniature solar cells to capture and store the sun’s energy.

The solar cells don’t look anything like the ones we’re used to seeing on houses or cars. What we can see is a thin copper ribbon, or filament, that has perovskite solar cells on one side and a layer of material acting as a supercapacitor on the other. The copper serves as a shared electrode, directly transferring and storing the charges generated by the perovskite.

Most existing solar cells are made of silicon, which requires silica rock to be converted to silicon crystals using ultra-high temperatures. Perovskite is a crystalline material that can be processed in a lab at room temperature for about half the current cost of silicon panels. Perovskite also has a more flexible structure and higher theoretical conversion efficiency than silicon.