Princeton's Plastics Hold Potential for Lowering Cost of Solar Panels

Monday, April 05 2010

Princeton University engineers have developed translucent, malleable, and electricity-conducting plastics, which could represent a low-cost alternative to indium tin oxide (ITO) - an expensive conducting material currently used in solar panels.

“Conductive polymers (plastics) have been around for a long time, but processing them to make something useful degraded their ability to conduct electricity,” said Yueh-Lin Loo, an associate professor of Chemical Engineering. “We have figured out how to avoid this trade-off. We can shape the plastics into a useful form while maintaining high conductivity.”

The area of research, known as "organic electronics" because plastics are carbon-based like living creatures, holds promise for producing new types of electronic devices and new ways of manufacturing existing technologies, but has been hampered by the mysterious loss of conductivity associated with moldable plastics.

“We discovered that in making the polymers moldable, their structures are trapped in a rigid form, which prevented electrical current from traveling through them,” said Loo.