Hasta La Ideas

What if you could paint your house with a kind of paint that transformed the entire house into an energy producing solar cell? Well, researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, directed by Somenath Mitra, thinks they have found a way to do this. They present their findings in a paper for the Journal of Materials Chemistry. In the paper, they explain how a combination of carbon nano-tube complex and Buckyball molecules on a polymer backing can produce create a flow of electrons, i.e electricity. When sunlight excites the polymer, it releases electrons, and the Buckyball molecule catches them. Although the Buckyball cannot create a flow of electrons, it can transfer them to the nano-tube where the flow is created. Researchers hope their discovery will be the base of a simple and cheap technology to build energy producing homes and, maybe, cars.brbr