UCLA creates polarized solar panels

Worried about not being able to find a power socket when your smartphone or laptop runs out of power? A new technology developed by researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science is expected to help solve this problem!

The UCLA engineering team discovered that as long as a solar polarizing film is built into the LCD screen of an electronic product, the surrounding light source, sunlight, and even the backlight of the LCD screen itself can be converted into electricity. The "polarizing organic photovoltaic" they created can make the LCD polarizing plate also have the function of a solar panel.

Yang Yang, a professor at the Department of Materials Science at UCLA, said that this is a revolutionary invention that can improve the performance of LCD displays. In the future, iPhones can be charged simply by sunlight while on the beach.

The backlight of an electronic product consumes 80-90% of the electricity, and 75% of the light emitted from the backlight is lost due to the polarizing film. LCDs equipped with polarized organic solar panels hope to be able to recover most of the unused energy.