Butterfly Wings are Highly Efficient Solar Cells

Recently, scientists have discovered butterfly wings are high-efficient solar cells. According the Daily Galaxy:

Research suggests that certain scales on butterfly wings are nanobiologically-tuned to absorb heat from sunlight, enabling the insect to survive in colder or higher-altitudes than normal.

In order to make highly efficient solar cells from the butterfly wings, you have to burn them.

Specifically, the wings have to be soaked in chemicals and burned away in an oven at five hundred degrees Celsius. This leaves a titanium-dioxide "butterfly microstructure photo-anode."...The researchers claim that the resulting films have a higher absorption ability than any other type of Grätzel cell, and Grätzel cells are already the highest-efficiency and among the cheapest models of cell available.

This doesn't sound like a practical application for creating solar cells, but it certainly adds to my amazement of the butterfly kingdom.

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Posted by Jennifer Lance at February 19, 2009 1:04 AM