Can Solar Panels Be Created Into The Form Of A Wire Instead Of A Flat Panel?

in other words is it possible to form a solar panel in a thick wire?

4 thoughts on “Can Solar Panels Be Created Into The Form Of A Wire Instead Of A Flat Panel?”

  1. It needs the surface area. If a wire was used you would need panels to focus the light on the wire so no space is saved.
    ?

  2. Sure. Recently it has been done experimentally. http://www.technologyreview.com/Nanotech…
    Personally I don’t think this is as useful as the inventors claim.
    As for thick wires… I don’t see a geometric advantage of making a wire. Solar cells do not like to be illuminated unevenly and a wire is kind of a guarantee for uneven illumination. I can’t quite imagine an application which would absolutely need a wire and couldn’t be done any other way.
    As a curiosity, solar wires will certainly stick around. As a practical application… probably not so much.
    That’s just my two cents.

  3. a solar cell is basically ohmic contacts to semiconductor material. forming it as a wire gives you very little area for incident light, hence such construction would be impractical and inefficient.
    it has to be at least wide enough so that the top metal doesn’t block light from entering the semiconductor material.

  4. There’s no reason why a material built as a sheet couldn’t be built as just a very very narrow sheet and be like a wire, but why would you want to? Key to the effectiveness of solar power is how much light they can capture and then make use of, which is multiplied by a factor proportional to width in a rectangle or whatever. Area is good.

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