...researchers at Wake Forest University\'s Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials have made significant strides in improving the efficiency of organic or flexible solar cells. ?The consumer market would be really open to having these conformal systems if you could, for instance, roll them up and put them away,? said Carroll, who is also an associate professor in Wake Forest?s physics department. ?Imagine a group of hikers with a tent that when you unrolled the tent and put it up, it could generate its own power. Imagine if the paint on your car that is getting hot in the sun was instead converting part of that heat to recharge your battery.? Carroll said flexible, organic solar cells also offer several possibilities for military use. ?The military would obviously want something like that because you could only put maybe tens of those big solar panels on a transport, but you could put hundreds of ultra-thin flexible ones on a transport and supply half the army,? he said.Using a set of polymer coatings, researchers at Wake Forest constructed a nanophase within the polymer called a ?mesostructure.? The ?mesostructure? changes the properties of the plastic and makes it better for collecting light.
