Artificial tree with leaves from solar panels

Finnish engineers from the VTT Technical Research Center printed a "tree" on a 3D printer with leaves from organic photocells. Who knows, maybe in the future such trees will become more useful than ordinary trees in urban environments. For example, they can give energy to streetlights, produce oxygen for city streets. You can plant whole forests of such trees!

Photovoltaic trees generate electricity both outdoors and indoors, and store it in the trunk. Batteries are placed there. A small bush with such leaves is enough to charge a mobile phone or simple LED lighting.


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Thanks to flexible and thin organic photo panels (0.2 mm thick), designers can realize the most fantastic projects. These are not only trees with flexible leaves, but also other functional objects.

All elements of the Finnish tree are printed on a 3D printer: a plastic barrel and branches, and organic photocells. The printer prints up to 100 meters of film per minute with such elements.



In this case, the area of ​​each photocell is 0.01444 m ² , including connections and necessary contacts.

200 leaves generate a current of 3.2 A / 10.4 W on a nice sunny day outside, occupying only 1 m ^{2 of} territory.

To print these trees, too, leaves quite a bit of material.



In addition to organic elements, Finnish researchers are experimenting with perovskite photovoltaic cells, which already demonstrate an efficiency of 0.19.