Fly Eyes Used For Solar Cells
It takes a twisted engineering mind to come up with something this brilliant: a biomimetic mold constructed from fly eyes. One particular type of fly eye has just the right shape that could be perfect for manufacturing efficient solar cells.
Lakhtakia and a team of Penn State researchers came up with a promising solution. First they picked corneas from blowflies because this common type of fly has ideal eyes for solar cell applications. According to a description from PSU, "Blowflies have compound eyes that are roughly hemispherical; but within that half sphere, the surface is covered by macroscale hexagonal eyes with nanoscale features."
Then the researchers took corneas, fixed them on a glass substrate, added a polymer to protect the shape and then coated nine-eye arrays in nickel within a vacuum chamber. The result was a master template that retained those useful nanoscale features. Ultimately that template can be used to replicate the pattern exactly. Next, the plan is to make a larger template from 30 blowfly corneas.
The findings were published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics (abstract). Earlier this summer Lakhtakia and a group of Italian scientists came up with a design (abstract) for special lenses based on fly eyes. "We found that properly designed bioinspired compound lenses can significantly improve the light-harvesting capabilities of silicon solar cells," they wrote.
Lakhtakia and his team are currently researching butterfly wings to figure out how it might be possible to create colored surfaces without using pigments. They might have reeled me in with the fly parts, but I'm not a big fan of messing with butterflies. Besides, we need as many eyes as we can get on improving solar tech.
Fly Eyes Used For Solar Cells : Discovery News
It takes a twisted engineering mind to come up with something this brilliant: a biomimetic mold constructed from fly eyes. One particular type of fly eye has just the right shape that could be perfect for manufacturing efficient solar cells.
Lakhtakia and a team of Penn State researchers came up with a promising solution. First they picked corneas from blowflies because this common type of fly has ideal eyes for solar cell applications. According to a description from PSU, "Blowflies have compound eyes that are roughly hemispherical; but within that half sphere, the surface is covered by macroscale hexagonal eyes with nanoscale features."
Then the researchers took corneas, fixed them on a glass substrate, added a polymer to protect the shape and then coated nine-eye arrays in nickel within a vacuum chamber. The result was a master template that retained those useful nanoscale features. Ultimately that template can be used to replicate the pattern exactly. Next, the plan is to make a larger template from 30 blowfly corneas.
The findings were published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics (abstract). Earlier this summer Lakhtakia and a group of Italian scientists came up with a design (abstract) for special lenses based on fly eyes. "We found that properly designed bioinspired compound lenses can significantly improve the light-harvesting capabilities of silicon solar cells," they wrote.
Lakhtakia and his team are currently researching butterfly wings to figure out how it might be possible to create colored surfaces without using pigments. They might have reeled me in with the fly parts, but I'm not a big fan of messing with butterflies. Besides, we need as many eyes as we can get on improving solar tech.
Fly Eyes Used For Solar Cells : Discovery News
