Just think about a single unit battery that can be recharged with light and also portable. A team of researchers working at UNIST at Korea was recently able to accomplish this task. The team announced the development of a single-unit, photo-rechargeable power source that can be ported from one place to another. The battery is based on highly-efficient silicon-based lithium-ion and solar cells based batteries. It is a completely new class of monolithically infused portable PV-battery system that has solar power as its power source. It has been designed well to work with sunlight as well as indoor lighting and is perfectly capable of empowering electric devices even in absence of light. 

 

Professor Sang-Young Lee from the same university who was also a part of this team, adds, “This device provides a solution to fix both the energy density problem of batteries and the energy storage concerns of solar cells. More importantly, batteries have relatively high power and energy densities under direct sunlight, which demonstrates its potential application as a solar-driven infinite energy conversion and storage system for use in electric vehicles and portable electronics.”

 

 

These batteries are based on miniaturized crystalline silicon photovoltaics (c-Si PVs)  and printed Lithium-ion Batteries (LIBs) that have been printed directly over an aluminium electrode that is made up of c-Si PV modules. In order to allow seamless electrical connection of two kinds of energy systems, the Aluminum metal layer is also used as a current collector for the LIB, it is also used as an electrode for solar based cells. This permits the battery to be charged without any loss of energy. The was successfully able to implement c-Si PV modules that are lossless by designing a rear electrode kind of solar cell.

 

According to the research team, this device is perfectly capable of getting charged completely under sunlight within just 2 minutes. It also demonstrated some decent storage of photo-rechargeable electrical energy at a temperature that goes up to 60 degrees centigrade and at a very low light intensity that only goes up to 8mW/cm2.