Print or Paint your own solar cells

Imagine if homeowners could print out plastic sheets of solar cells on inexpensive printers. Imagine further that the solar sheets could be plastered over the roofs of houses and generate electricity – acting in a sense like mini-power stations for the houses. Such a technology would be an enormous boon to American’s growing environmental movement.

And that is the aim of Somenath Mitra, a professor of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences, who is experimenting with a solar cell derived from polymers that could one day power not only houses but cars, laptops and other consumer computers. Mitra’s solar research was featured in the June 2007 issue of the Journal of Materials Chemistry, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry,

Over the course of his teaching career, Mitra has published 70 journal papers and is the co-author of the book, Environmental Chemical Analysis. He edited another book titled Sample Preparation Techniques in Analytical Chemistry.  He holds five patents and has made more than 150 presentations at academic conferences. In the below interview, Mitra discusses his pioneering solar cell research.

Read the original NJIT article here with a Q& A from Somenath Mitra
Make sure to watch the video aswell