Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Solar Windows?

Imagine standing in front of a wall of windows, surveying
the view. You hear someone enter the room behind you.
You turn. “Welcome,” you say. “Here is the video I wanted
to show you.” At the press of a button, the view vanishes
and the windows transform into a high-definition TV screen.

No, your friend isn’t James Bond, and you aren’t the next
Q. Still, even as you watch the video, your window-TV is
doing as much to help avert global catastrophe as any
Bond-film gadget ever did. You see, it’s also a solar panel,
constantly harvesting renewable energy from the sun. The
problem of climate change is not a typical movie supervillain,
but it’s a trickier problem than Goldfinger posed. Worse,
humanity’s efforts to solve it with existing technologies aren’t

The heroes swooping in to the rescue could be a new
technology called organic semiconductors, a new way to make
materials that conduct electricity only under certain conditions.
Most semiconductors in modern electronics are made of
crystalline, rock-forming elements like silicon. Organic semi-
conductors, by contrast, are made primarily of carbon-based
molecules. They take less energy to make than conventional
semiconductors. A conventional photovoltaic cell, for instance,
can take years to produce as much energy as was required to
build it; an organic photovoltaic cell takes just months.

However, perhaps the most exciting thing about organic semi-
conductors is that it’s possible to design molecules that are
flexible, lightweight, colored or completely transparent. In the
lab I work in, we design and test new small molecules that
have specific, targeted properties – like making a simple

transparent pane into a window, screen and solar panel.

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