Solar Glasses – More than just glasses…

Have you ever imagined to produce energy using your glasses? Now it’s possible.

How?

The Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT, in Germany, confirmed that. Researchers published their study about the development of new solar lens on the specialised magazine Energy Technology. This new lens is able to generate energy using the one from the sun.

The glasses we are talking about are called Solar Glasses. They are made of organic solar cells (we have already discussed on Close-up Engineering HERE): these cells are flexible, transparent, and light-weight . They can be also manufactured in arbitrary shapes or colors, unlike the Silicon ones. In the research publised on the magazine, the researchers from KIT now present sunglasses with colored, semitransparent solar cells applied onto lenses that supply a microprocessor and two displays with electric power.

“We bring solar power to places where other solar technologies fail”

it’s what Dr. Alexander Colsmann says, Head of Organic Photovoltaics Group at KIT’s Light Technology Institute (LTI).  The Solar Glasses studied by the scientists of his research team, is self-powered to measure and display the solar illumination intensity and ambient temperature.

Characteristics

The solar cell lenses are perfectly fitted to a commercial frame. They have a thickness of 1.6 millimeters and weight about 6 grams, like the lenses of traditional sunglesses. The microprocessor and the two small displays are integrated into the temples of the Solar Glasses. They can show bar graphs about the illumination intensity and the ambient temperature. The Solar Glasses can work in indoor spaces under illumination down to 500 Lux, that is the illumination of a common office or a living room. In these conditions, each of the“smart” lenses produces about 200 microwatts of electric power, that is enough to supply devices like for example hearing aid or step counter.

Read the entire article published on Energy Technology HERE.