Until now, covering the roof or facade of a building with standard solar photovoltaic cells would change the structure's appearance - not always for the better! The need to maximize solar collection efficiency governs the black or gray colour of today's cell arrays. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering (Jena, Germany) want to change that. "Not enough work has been done so far on combining photovoltaics and design elements to really do the term "customised photovoltaics" justice," said project manager Kevin Fuchsel in a news release. Fuchsel and his team have been working for four years to develop cost-effective manufacturing processes to increase solar panel efficiency design flexibility for architects and designers. The work includes developing production processes for coloured solar cells from thin-film silicon wafers, as described here.
