Researchers Create Flexible Solar Cells with Silicon Wire Arrays
This is a schematic diagram of the light-trapping elements used to optimize absorption within a polymer-embedded silicon wire array. (Caltech/Michael Kelzenberg)
Using arrays of long, thin silicon wires embedded in a polymer substrate, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has created a new type of flexible solar cell that enhances the absorption of sunlight and efficiently converts its photons into electrons. The solar cell does all this using only a fraction of the expensive semiconductor materials required by conventional solar cells.
“These solar cells have, for the first time, surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials,” says Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor, professor of applied physics and materials science, and director of Caltech’s Resnick Institute, which focuses on sustainability research.
The light-trapping limit of a material refers to how much sunlight it is able to absorb. The silicon-wire arrays absorb up to 96 percent of incident sunlight at a single wavelength and 85 percent of total collectible sunlight. “We’ve surpassed previous optical microstructures developed to trap light,” he says. (more…)
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State-of-the-Art Probe Will Lead to Better Solar Cells
SDSU professor Venkateswara Bommisetty has a National Science Foundation grant to build a first-of-its-kind microscope that could help scientists build better solar cells.
Federal research dollars will help South Dakota State University scientists build a first-of-its-kind microscope that could ultimately help scientists at SDSU and elsewhere develop better solar cells for converting sunlight to electricity.
Professor Venkateswara Bommisetty in SDSU’s Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science will build a new photoactivated, scanning probe microscopy tool that makes significant improvements on the existing scanning probe microscope.
“It will simultaneously measure efficiency-limiting factors by identifying defects, their structure and locations in a wide variety of solar cells, that existing microscopes are not able to do,” Bommisetty said.
“This instrument will also probe the light-energy conversion mechanisms in other optoelectronic devices such as light-emitting diodes.”
The new equipment will be developed by an SDSU team under Bommisetty’s leadership. Bommisetty received $456,000 for development of the scanning probe microscopy tool so that he and his colleagues can study photoactivated processes — processes activated by light — at the nanoscale. The grant is from the National Science Foundation. SDSU and its Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science are supplying an additional $200,000 to make a total project of about $650,000. (more…)
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Innovation Puts Next-Generation Solar Cells on the Horizon
Here, Monash Phd Student Hasitha Weerasinghe, Dr Udo Bach, Professor Yi-Bing Cheng and Victorian Minister for Energy and Resources, Peter Batchelor launch the first trials of new printable solar cells.
In a world first, a Monash University-led international research team has developed an innovative way to boost the output of the next generation of solar cells.
Scientists at Monash University, in collaboration with colleagues from the universities of Wollongong and Ulm in Germany, have produced tandem dye-sensitised solar cells with a three-fold increase in energy conversion efficiency compared with previously reported tandem dye-sensitised solar cells.
Lead researcher Dr Udo Bach, from Monash University, said the breakthrough had the potential to increase the energy generation performance of the cells and make them a viable and competitive alternative to traditional silicon solar cells.
Dr Bach said the key was the discovery of a new, more efficient type of dye that made the operation of inverse dye-sensitised solar cells much more efficient.
When the research team combined two types of dye-sensitised solar cell – one inverse and the other classic – into a simple stack, they were able to produce for the first time a tandem solar cell that exceeded the efficiency of its individual components. (more…)
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Extreme Solar Energy Cell Makeover
Dr. Alex Freundlich, research professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering, Center for Advanced Materials, University of Houston.
Commercialization of new solar technology to boost solar efficiency.
A pioneer in solar power in the 1990s before it became “sexy,” University of Houston Professor Alex Freundlich recently entered into a collaborative research agreement with U.K.-based start-up QuantaSol for the development of the next generation of super efficient solar cells.
“A sabbatical 20 years ago brought me to Houston from France, when at the time Houston was one of few places in the world to find a steady support for solar energy research,” said Dr. Alex Freundlich, research professor of physics and electrical and computer engineering, Center for Advanced Materials, University of Houston. “One of the reasons I decided to stay in Houston was the opportunity to work with NASA and to continue my research in high efficiency solar energy materials and devices. Since the early days of the space program solar cells have been the workhorse of space exploration and the need of satellites with more onboard power has fueled high risk research in solar cells. In the past few decades, most major advances in the area of high efficiency solar cells came from space development and exploration.”
Freundlich met Keith Barnham, co-founder of QuantaSol, a former faculty at Imperial College London, early in his career while working as a staff scientist on solar cells at the French National Scientific Research Laboratory (CNRS).
“Keith convinced me that low dimensional structures held a promise for great improvements in solar cells. As a physicist these quantum structures opened access to refreshing and sophisticated device physics. I believe that over the years the type of science that Keith and I have dedicated our career to has not only produced remarkable device results but created an excellent opportunity for the intellectual development of students and faculty involved in these project,” said Freundlich. (more…)
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Chemists Seek to Powering the World with Sunlight - The ‘Artificial Leaf’ & More
Scientists are making progress toward development of an “artificial leaf” that mimics a real leaf’s chemical magic with photosynthesis — but instead converts sunlight and water into a liquid fuel such as methanol for cars and trucks. That is among the conclusions in a newly-available report from top authorities on solar energy who met at the 1st Annual Chemical Sciences and Society Symposium. The gathering launched a new effort to initiate international cooperation and innovative thinking on the global energy challenge.
The three-day symposium, which took place in Germany this past summer, included 30 chemists from China, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. It was organized through a joint effort of the science and technology funding agencies and chemical societies of each country, including the U. S. National Science Foundation and the American Chemical Society (ACS), the world’s largest scientific society. The symposium series was initiated though the ACS Committee on International Activities in order to offer a unique forum whereby global challenges could be tackled in an open, discussion-based setting, fostering innovative solutions to some of the world’s most daunting challenges.
A “white paper” entitled “Powering the World with Sunlight,” describes highlights of the symposium and is available along with related materials here. (more…)
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Major Advance in Organic Solar Cells
Guillermo Bazan is a professor of Chemistry and of Materials at UC Santa Barbara.
Gains in speed, quality and current over conventional production techniques hold promise for both research and commercial production
Professor Guillermo Bazan and a team of postgraduate researchers at UC Santa Barbara’s Center for Polymers and Organic Solids (CPOS) today announced a major advance in the synthesis of organic polymers for plastic solar cells. Bazan’s team:
* reduced reaction time by 99%, from 48 hours to 30 minutes, and
* increased average molecular weight of the polymers by a factor of more than 3.
The reduced reaction time effectively cuts production time for the organic polymers by nearly 50%, since reaction time and purification time are approximately equal in the production process, in both laboratory and commercial environments.
The higher molecular weight of the polymers, reflecting the creation of longer chains of the polymers, has a major benefit in increasing current density in plastic solar cells by as much as a factor of more than four. Over polymer batches with varying average molecular weights, produced using varying combinations of the elements of the new methodology, the increase in current density was found to be approximately proportional to the increase in average molecular weight. (more…)
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Looking Deeply into Polymer Solar Cells
This is a 3-D electron tomography image of a polymer-metal oxide solar cell. The 3-D nanoscopic morphology shows the interpenetrating metal oxide network in (yellow) below an aluminum contact (gray) inside a polymer matrix (black). (Eindhoven University of Technology)
Researchers from the Eindhoven University of Technology and the University of Ulm have made the first high-resolution 3D images of the inside of a polymer solar cell. This gives them important new insights in the nanoscale structure of polymer solar cells and its effect on the performance. The findings were published online in Nature Materials on Sunday 13 September.
The investigations shed new light on the operational principles of polymer solar cells.
These solar cells do not have the high efficiencies of their silicon counterparts yet. Polymer cells, however, can be printed in roll-to-roll processes, at very high speeds, which makes the technology potentially very cost-effective. Added to that, polymer cells are flexible and lightweight, and therefore suitable to be used on vehicles or clothing or to be incorporated in the design of objects. (more…)
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Carbon Nanotubes Could Make Efficient Solar Cells
by Anne Ju, Cornell Chronicle
Paul McEuen, Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics (Courtesy Cornell University)
Using a carbon nanotube instead of traditional silicon, Cornell researchers have created the basic elements of a solar cell that hopefully will lead to much more efficient ways of converting light to electricity than now used in calculators and on rooftops.
The researchers fabricated, tested and measured a simple solar cell called a photodiode, formed from an individual carbon nanotube. Reported online Sept. 11 in the journal Science, the researchers — led by Paul McEuen, the Goldwin Smith Professor of Physics, and Jiwoong Park, assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology — describe how their device converts light to electricity in an extremely efficient process that multiplies the amount of electrical current that flows. This process could prove important for next-generation high efficiency solar cells, the researchers say. (more…)
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Lower-Cost Solar Cells to be Printed Like Newspaper, Painted on Rooftops
By Daniel J. Vargas
Chemical engineering Professor Brian Korgel tests one of his printed solar cells.
Solar cells could soon be produced more cheaply using nanoparticle “inks” that allow them to be printed like newspaper or painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops to absorb electricity-producing sunlight.
Brian Korgel, a University of Texas at Austin chemical engineer, is hoping to cut costs to one-tenth of their current price by replacing the standard manufacturing process for solar cells – gas-phase deposition in a vacuum chamber, which requires high temperatures and is relatively expensive.
“That’s essentially what’s needed to make solar-cell technology and photovoltaics widely adopted,” Korgel said. “The sun provides a nearly unlimited energy resource, but existing solar energy harvesting technologies are prohibitively expensive and cannot compete with fossil fuels.” (more…)
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The Quest for Cheap, Transparent Solar Cells
If solar cells were transparent they could be fitted to windows and building facades. Physical modeling helps in the development of suitable materials for transparent electronics and thus in creating the basis for transparent solar cells.
Offering a view of the garden and an adjacent field, it looks like any other window. But this window offers an additional feature: it also produces electricity. The facades of the house, too, harness solar energy to supply the occupants with electrical power. This is what the domestic power supply of the future could look like. The surface area used to produce energy would increase greatly with transparent solar cells. (more…)
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Lasers Are Making Solar Cells Competitive
Solar electricity has a future: It is renewable and available in unlimited quantities, and it does not produce any gases detrimental to the climate. Its only drawback right now is the price: the electric power currently being produced by solar cells in northern Europe must be subsidized if it is to compete against the household electricity generated by traditional power plants. At “Laser 2009″ in Munich, June 15 to 18, Fraunhofer researchers will be demonstrating how laser technology can contribute to optimizing the manufacturing costs and efficiency of solar cells.
Cell phones, computers, MP3 players, kitchen stoves, and irons all have one thing in common: They need electricity. And in the future, more and more cars will also be fuelled by electric power. If the latest forecast from the World Energy Council WEC can be believed, global electricity requirements will double in the next 40 years. At the same time, prices for the dwindling resources of petroleum and natural gas are climbing. (more…)
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Ancient Diatoms Lead to New Technology for Solar Energy
Greg Rorrer, an Oregon State University professor of chemical engineering.
Engineers at Oregon State University have discovered a way to use an ancient life form to create one of the newest technologies for solar energy, in systems that may be surprisingly simple to build compared to existing silicon-based solar cells.
The secret: diatoms.
These tiny, single-celled marine life forms have existed for at least 100 million years and are the basis for much of the life in the oceans, but they also have rigid shells that can be used to create order in a natural way at the extraordinarily small level of nanotechnology.
By using biology instead of conventional semiconductor manufacturing approaches, researchers at OSU and Portland State University have created a new way to make “dye-sensitized” solar cells, in which photons bounce around like they were in a pinball machine, striking these dyes and producing electricity. This technology may be slightly more expensive than some existing approaches to make dye-sensitized solar cells, but can potentially triple the electrical output. (more…)
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Solar Technology and Bladeless Turbine Reportedly Set to Revolutionize Industry
IAS's unique thin-film solar panels can be manufactured at a fraction of the cost of today's photovoltaic solar panels. (Photo courtesy IAS)
According to a recent company press release, International Automated Systems, Inc. (IAS) and Renewable Energy Development Corporation (REDCO), have announced that REDCO will be working with IAS to purchase IAS’s solar panels and new bladeless turbine for utility-scale solar projects.
After completing its due diligence of the IAS technology that included a thorough analysis of the independent engineering review of IAS’s new solar panels and turbine, REDCO has concluded that the IAS technology is commercially viable.
The third party engineering review was conducted by engineers with Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in physics, mechanical engineering and nuclear engineering from universities such as M.I.T., U.C. Berkley, U.C. Davis, and DePaul. (more…)
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Plastic Solar Cells for Portable Electronic Devices
University of Chicago chemists Luping Yu (right) and Yongye Liang display a new material they synthesized called PTB1. The University of Chicago has licensed the material to Solarmer Energy Inc., which is developing plastic solar cells for portable electronic devices. (Photo by Lloyd DeGrane)
Solarmer Energy Inc. is developing plastic solar cells for portable electronic devices that will incorporate technology invented at the University of Chicago.
The company is on track to complete a commercial-grade prototype later this year, said Dina Lozofsky, vice president of IP development and strategic alliances at Solarmer. The prototype, a cell measuring eight square inches (50 square centimeters), is expected to achieve 8 percent efficiency and to have a lifetime of at least three years.
“New materials with higher efficiencies are really the key in our industry. Plastic solar cells are behind traditional solar-cell technology in terms of the efficiency that it can produce right now,” Lozofsky said. “Everyone in the industry is in the 5 percent to 6 percent range.” (more…)
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