Just when you thought–as you were undoubtedly thinking–that ski helmet design could not be improved upon any further, someone has to go and stick a solar panel on the thing. Please revise your mental representation of the world accordingly.
Fraunhofer IZM in Berlin is responsible for this particular disruption. (It teamed up with TEXSYS and the Technische Universität Berlin.) Having a solar panel atop your ski helmet doesn’t mean you can harness the sun’s energy to do your skiing for you–you’ll still have to exert old-fashioned muscular effort to navigate those moguls. But the modern, tech-savvy skier apparently has electrical needs nonetheless. Explains Fraunhofer IZM: “Mobile devices like smart phones and MP3 players can then be connected wirelessly via Bluetooth. Incoming calls can be received without breaking glide using the accompanying Bluetooth-enabled glove. The user can even operate an MP3 player remotely from the glove, ensuring that cumbersome removal of gloves in sub-zero temperatures is finally a thing of the past.”
The main innovation here, points out Treehugger–and it’s a significant one–is in the flexibility of the solar panels. Researchers have made flexible solar panels before, but typically only ones that could bend in a single direction. Fraunhofer engineered a new solar cell structure solution that enables a solar panel to conform to the spherical curve atop a helmet. They explain that their new packaging tech features “extremely high quality, monocrystalline silicon solar cellars [that] can be divided into tiny individual chips and adapted to a three-dimensional, curved shape.”
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