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Solar energy is on the rise. Many technical advances have made Highly Efficient Solar Cells quite efficient and affordable in recent years. A big disadvantage remains in the fact that solar cells produce no power when it’s raining.

This may change, however, in the journal Angewandte Chemie, Chinese researchers have now introduced a new approach for making an all-weather solar cell that is triggered by both sunlight and raindrops. 

For the conversion of solar energy to electricity, the team from the Ocean University of China (Qingdao) and Yunnan Normal University (Kunming, China) developed a highly efficient solar cell. In order to allow rain to produce electricity as well, they coated this cell with a whisper-thin film of graphene.

So, how do they generate current from rain? Raindrops are not pure water. They contain salts that split up into positive and negative ions. To manipulate that bit of chemistry, the Ocean University researchers turned to graphene, the one-atom-thick sheets of carbon. Graphene's electrons can attract the positively charged ions, such as sodium, calcium and ammonium. The result: separated layers of positive and negative ions that act much like acapacitor to store energy.

With that in mind, the scientists added graphene to a dye-sensitized solar cell, a kind of inexpensive thin-film solar cell, then put them on a flexible, transparent backing of indium tin oxide and plastic. The resultingflexible solar cell demonstrated a solar-to-electric conversion efficiency of up to 6.53 percent, and generated hundreds of microvolts from slightly salty water that was used to simulate rainwater. “Future solar cells may produce electricity in all weather,” Tang says.

The scientists detailed their findings on the possibility of a rainy daysolar cell in the 21 March online edition of the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

Future research will investigate how to handle the variety of ions found in rain, as well how to generate electricity from the low concentrations of these ions typically seen in rainwater, Tang says.

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