How do you think about solar panels? They are blue, they are square-shaped, and they are rigid – or thin-film solar panels, which are mostly black, long and bendable. Both kinds of solar panels are usually installed on rooftops or ground-mounted. However, people’s imagination always goes out of the box. SolarLayer, an innovative solar technology, will transform roads, walls and windows into solar panels.

The solar charger of SolarLayer project. (Source: SolarLayer/Indiegogo)

The SolarLayer project is now on indiegogo for crowdfunding. The technology is about a new additive for paints, coatings and flooring that transforms any surface into a solar energy receptor and generates power through photovoltaic effective. With the widely applicable feature, the technology would be attractive to end-users of solar power because they can generate solar electricity by themselves easily. The technology is designed to work in 3/12V and is expected to last for more than 20 years.

SolarLayer is a registered and patented product, created by a group of scientists composed of Argentine, British and Swiss. The product has already been tested and implemented in different parts of the world where durability and performance was evaluated. In order to bring SolarLayer from the lab to the market, the scientists are now in a second stage of research and development, for which are calling interested people to finance the project.

The scientists believe SolarLayer will revolutionize the PV industry and change how people use/generate power.

Technology

SolarLayer is a system composed of three basic elements: a fibre conductor, PV cells and a voltage stabilizer. The conductor is a super thin 2µm copper-based alloy fibre that acts as the basic conducting surface. This fibre can be fabricated as a cloth or as a powder. The PV cells, which is the most revolutionary part, have the capacity to transform light sources to electricity, to work as an intelligent conductor and to sense the magnetic North, allowing energy flow to be trapped by a special copper wire. Last but not least, the tension stabilizer that receives electric current from different parts of the conductor fibre by the copper wire and it stabilizes it before generating a useful current output.