Renewable energy is critical for both today and tomorrow. In this sense, solar panels are becoming more useful day by day. A new solar panel emerging in China opens up a much more personal use area for solar energy.
Chinese scientists developed wearable solar panels
Ziyuan Wang and his team from Nankai University in Tianjin, China, conducted an important research. Accordingly, scientists have developed a solar panel that maintains body temperature for high and low temperatures. The panel, which has a flexible structure, is an important step for our clothes to meet technology.
According to the research published in Science magazine, this developed device has certain advantages over its counterparts. Generally, these types of heating devices only have the feature of heating or cooling the body.
However, this solar panel developed by the research team has both heating and cooling features. The main reason for this is that the developed wearable solar panel has a structure that regulates body temperature. The device owes this ability to the electrocaloric component it contains. This structure works according to body temperature. Accordingly, this structure heats the wearable solar panel when it works, and reduces the temperature of the device when it is not working.
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The wearable solar panel also has the ability to operate 24 hours a day. The solar panel, which consumes very low energy, transfers the energy it receives from the sun to this electrocaloric component for heating. The device stores the remainder of this energy. Thus, this energy comes into play even during hours when there is no daylight.
Flexible polymer solar cells using photovoltaic cells are used for the battery of this solar panel. Thus, the wearable solar panel will be much more portable. Although the device is still in the testing phase, it is unlikely to be seen in daily clothes for now. It is expected that this panel will be used in technical clothing in the first stage.
These panels, which have a flexible structure and offer heating and cooling possibilities, seem to open up new opportunities in terms of usage areas of solar panels. In the first stage, these panels can also be seen in technical workers working in harsh conditions, Astonaut clothing and extreme sports clothing.