One of our best energy-producing strategies in building design is the use of solar power. Solar panels can do a great job at offsetting a buildings energy usage, however, one of the biggest challenges with them is figuring out where to incorporate them. It’s important to put solar panels in locations where they can actually receive enough sunlight to be effective while also keeping them from hurting the buildings design. But, one new material now allows us to incorporate solar panels into a building’s facade without even being noticed.
Transparent PV panels offer all new ways to produce energy with a building’s design. They can work as windows, doors, or even shading devices if you use partially transparent panels. The panels work by absorbing parts of the light spectrum that are invisible to the human eye, allowing the visible light spectrum to pass freely into the building. This obviously raises an efficiency issue as traditional solar panels are designs to absorb all light, resulting in more energy production. But, with certain buildings transparent solar panels could actually yield higher results than opaque panels, specifically buildings with more wall area than roof area. There is still a lot of research to be done on this technology, it is currently unknown whether implementing this on every south facing facade could outperform having a select few buildings use solar power.
(https://solarmagazine.com/solar-panels/transparent-solar-panels/)
Material Transformations 
Using new materials to improve the malfunction that the previous ones used to bring into the design is an excellent notion that developing the current materials into new and improved ones has is doing in technology and science. But at the time of improving, it brings in a package. For example, the transparent solar panels, one is that they can only produce less amount of power. You will have to buy a large set of solar cells to power up your entire house. One other key drawback is that when the sky is filled with clouds, translucent solar panels won’t produce enough power. The set-up cost of delicate solar cells is high. So in improving the current materials, it seems that sometimes the need for making them more flexible for the design(in this example of Pv panels) has drawbacks in other areas. Another disadvantage is that the cheaper material widely in terms of the commercial has accepted that it will take a long time for the new ones to be widespread among the buyers and developers. If we like it or not, architecture is just not happening in the laboratories’ studios. It can happen through people who negotiate about which material is better to be used in a building, bringing more profits. Another challenge that these panels are still dealing with is the surface they are covering. This is now in a debate that it can be more efficient in energy and reasonable with the minimum surface. It is essential to see which areas we want to improve the materials, the new improvement will bring excitement and alternatives for the design, but at the same time, we need to see it thoroughly with other economic factors too to see the timeline of when it can be as common as a glass material for a window of a house and people will not know the difference between them.
LikeLike