A solar cell scatters light more effectively when it is textured rather than smooth, increasing its efficiency. Scientists have searched for the most effective texture with a reasonable manufacturing cost.

"We had a hunch that Blu-ray discs might work for improving solar cells, and, to our delight, we found the existing patterns are already very good," says Jiaxing Huang, a materials chemist and associate professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, as reported in Phys.org.

Researchers replicated Blu-ray patterns on the active layer of a polymer solar cell and found the cell was more efficient than a control solar cell with a random surface pattern.

Researchers looked at the data processing algorithms in the Blu-ray standard and noted they serve two major purposes:

• Achieving as high a degree of compression as possible by converting the video signals into a seemingly random sequence of 0s and 1s; and
• Increasing error tolerance by adding controlled redundancy into the data sequence, which also limits the number of consecutive 0s and 1s.

"In addition to improving polymer solar cells, our simulation suggests the Blu-ray patterns could be broadly applied for light trapping in other kinds of solar cells," says Cheng Sun, an associate professor of mechanical engineering.

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