New self-assembling photovoltaic technology that repairs itself

Plants are good at doing what scientists and engineers have been struggling to do

for decades:converting sunlight into stored energy, and doing so reliably day after day, year after year. Now someMIT scientists have succeeded in mimicking a key aspect of that process.

One of the problems withharvesting sunlight is that the sun's rays can be highly destructive to many materials. Sunlight leads to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to harness it. But plants have adopted an interesting strategy to address this issue: They constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun's energy are, in effect, always brand new.

That process has now been imitated by Michael Strano, the Charles and Hilda Roddey Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and his team of graduate students and researchers. They have created a novel set of self-assembling molecules that can turn sunlight into electricity; the molecules can be repeatedly broken down and then reassembled quickly, just by adding or removing an additional solution. Their paper on the work was published on Sept. 5 inNature Chemistry.

Strano says the idea first occurred to him when he was reading about plant biology. "I was really impressed by how plant cells have this extremely efficient repair mechanism," he says. In full summer sunlight, "a leaf on a tree is recycling its proteins about every 45 minutes, even though you might think of it as a static photocell."

http://infogreenglobal.com/new-self-assembling-photovoltaic-technology-that-repairs-itself/

New self-assembling photovoltaic technology that repairs itself

By: InfoGreen

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