hi, my name is ingmar bruder. i’m a research scientist in basf. so basf is the largest chemical companyin the world and our business segments are plastics and performance chemicals as for example coatings or functional polymers, functional solutions, as for example construction chemicals and certainly agricultural, and oil and gas.
What Are Solar Panels Made Of, so in the year 2050 is expected that about nine billion people will live on thisplanet and most of them want to be mobile andthe question is how to find a way to ensure mobility in asustainable and a cost efficient way
and one possibility could be to inventcars which drive by electric engines. so what we're doing in basf is we are developing organic photovoltaics, organic solarcells, and since this is a very complex topic a lot of people from differentprofessions have to work together for example chemists, quantum chemistsand physicists. so since we are a chemical company andwe will sell materials, chemicals, in the end of the day which can be used to produce organic solar cells we need additionally partners fromindustry or from academia, to make systems, to make complete organic photovoltaic systems.
traditional solar cells are made mainlyout of silicon and the reason for that is that it can be processed very well, it conducts very well, and it absorbs light in the right optical range. here in these labs, my team and myself we are developingorganic photovoltaic devices and basically one of these devices youcan see here and this type of solar cell was also used inthe smart forvision so the main difference between solar cells based on inorganicmaterials for example silicon
and organic solar cells is that heredyes are used to convert light into electricity and basf has knowledge or a lot of know-how of about over 140years in inventing in creating new dyes andwhat we did here is to invent a new dye class which canconvert light into electricity and the big advantages of these solarcells are that they can be produced verycheap, in a very cheap and easy way. you can produce them in any colorbasically you want to have and they are transparent. so basically what you're seeing here
are different organic solar cells. yousee if they're made out of different colors different dyes and they are running ahelicopter as a demonstrator but certainly this is a demonstrator andfor future applications you want to power real devices and how that might look like you can seehere. so basically that's a mobile phone charger powered by organic transparent solarcells basically here you see my blackberry and i can put it here on the charger and you can see here the clock appearswhich means that my blackberry is charged at the moment. so if you want to design the perfect solar cell
it should be black because certainly a black coloris absorbing all the visible light however with organic solar cells we can produceany color you want to have for aesthetic reasons so if you're buying nowadays solar cells foryour house you have a guarantee that the solarcells will live for about twenty years. they're pretty efficient and you pay something between one euros and two euros per watt peak so what we're doing actually here in our lab is to increase efficiency of the organic solar cells to increase thelifetime in order to catch up with existing technologies and even more important that we aredeveloping here the production mechanism allowing us to produce our solar cells in the end of the day for much cheaper conditions
so if we are talking about marketentrance of organic photovoltaics we have to distinguish between differentmarkets. for example if you're talking about consumer electronics there will be first products availableprobably in the next few years. if we're talking about construction thenthe properties or the issues of the solarcells are much tougher to handle, for example we have to provide a lifetime of twenty years, we have to provide efficiencies of twodigit values and this will take some more years. so as a scientist you're notreproducing things what other people
have done before or you're not waiting for orders. as a scientist you have to be creative, youhave to be foolish and that's how i am and therefore i like my job.
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