HelioSkin: bio-inspired customizable solar panels that can track light

Solar has proven to be a reliable and renewable source of energy, and it’s not uncommon to see large solar panels mounted onto roofs or arranged in fields, capturing and converting the sun’s vital rays into power. However, one of the challenges to the widespread adoption of solar panels is that some consider them to be rather unsightly. To overcome this challenge, a disciplinary team of researchers from Cornell University are developing HelioSkin, a conformable bio-inspired photovoltaic technology that could wrap around structures and various shapes, offering more dynamic and more aesthetic solar power capturing.

The team behind HelioSkin brings together researchers from various departments, including project leader Jenny Sabin, Professor in Architecture in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning; Itai Cohen, Professor of Physics in the College of Arts and Sciences; and Adrienne Roeder, Professor in the Section of Plant Biology in the School of Integrative Plant Science. The aim of the project is to create more visually appealing and more easily integrated solar panels that can actually track the sun through their bio-inspired design.

“Nature is not efficient,” Sabin explained. “It’s resilient, and biology is in it for the long game, over much longer time scales. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that plants that track the sun exhibit a photosynthetic advantage. And we think that’s a pretty powerful way to think about sustainability and resiliency in architecture.”

While the long-term vision for HelioSkin is to print flexible, origami-like photovoltaic sheets by the kilometer using roll-to-roll printing, which could be wrapped over buildings in an effort to curb the ecological impact of the construction industry, at the current stage of development, the team is working on a smaller scale, leveraging computational design and digital fabrication processes like 3D printing to create custom filters and photovoltaic panel assemblies.

“The basic idea is to try to print things in 2D, which is cheap, and then morph it into 3D, allowing it to curve around structures,” Cohen elaborated. “You can’t just take a normal sheet of paper and wrap something. It’s going to have all sorts of creases to it. Like if you try to wrap an orange, you get all these crinkles. One of the innovations that we came up with was to cut the paper into a pattern of panels and hinges that allows it to locally stretch around these round objects. A second strategy we came up with is to use fabric as a way to make the hinge. Fabric is floppy enough to give you that hinge-like behavior.”

Presently, the team is kicking off a three-year pilot project that will aim to develop HelioSkin for the purpose of making small solar canopies for backyards. This project, backed by the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program, aims to complete a full-scale prototype by the second year and by the end of the pilot project, the research group hopes to be in the early stages of commercialization for the solar panel canopy, which will be able to power outdoor appliances and lighting.

“HelioSKin is part of that grand vision of ‘how do we make solar attractive so that people actually find it usable and interesting?’,” added  Roeder. “The goal is to have it morphing and tracking the light, from small scale all the way to building scale.” It’s not entirely clear how or if additive manufacturing technologies will figure into the final product, but it has been playing a role in the development of these morphable, flexible materials that can integrate photovoltaic properties and track the light for optimal efficiency.