Princeton Solar Researchers Take Leaf From Plants’ Book
8th May 2012
No pun intended, of course.
Solar power researchers at Princeton University have discovered that by mimicking the surface of leaves, they can create solar cells that are better at capturing sunlight for a 47 percent efficiency boost.
In the kind of discovery that’s obvious after the fact, the researchers have “roughed up” the surface of their cells, in imitation of the way that leaves use microscopic irregularities in their surfaces to maximize their harvesting of the sun.