May

14

Closer to a True Paint On Solar Panel

May 14, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Qiaoqiang Gan, University at Buffalo assistant professor of electrical engineering and his team are developing a new generation of photovoltaic cells that produce more power and cost less to manufacture than what’s available today. Gan is working on the use of plasmonic-enhanced organic photovoltaic materials. These devices don’t match traditional solar cells in terms of [...]

May

13

Solar Electricity by Plant Photosynthesis

May 13, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Ramaraja Ramasamy, assistant professor in the University of Georgia (UGA) College of Engineering said, “We have developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis so that we can capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make sugars.” Ramasamy is also a member of UGA’s Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. The sun is the largest source [...]

Apr

22

Blowing Beyond the Solar Cell Limit

April 22, 2013 | Leave a Comment

The Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit asserts that the ultimate solar cell conversion efficiency can never exceed 34% for a single optimized semiconductor junction.  Researchers at MIT have shown they have a way to blow past that limit.  That will raise a cheer to an industry in real need of a major boost. Decades of research on [...]

Mar

11

Quantum Dot Photovoltaic Solar Cell Improvement

March 11, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Quantum dot photovoltaics are not market ready just yet, but efficiency and production costs are quite attractive.  A new technique developed by University of Toronto Engineering Professor Ted Sargent and his research group could lead to significantly more efficient solar cells. Sargent’s group has devised a new technique to improve efficiency in colloidal quantum dot [...]

Jan

31

A Cheaper Super Thin Solar Cell

January 31, 2013 | 1 Comment

Erik Marstein, head of the Norwegian Research Center for Solar Cell Technology, head of Research for the solar cell unit at the Institute for Energy Technology (IFE) at Kjeller outside of Oslo, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Oslo (UiO) with Professor Aasmund Sudbø in the Department of [...]

Jan

29

Natural Geometry Makes More Efficient Solar Cells

January 29, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Researchers at Northwestern University’s McCormick Department of Mechanical Engineering have developed a new design for organic solar cells that could lead to more efficient, less expensive solar power.  The battle on production expense for silicon cells has an estimated 10 times cost disadvantage to coal, transmission and distribution costs.  So it’s a long climb.  Organic [...]

Jan

21

New World Record for Thin Film Solar Cell Efficiency

January 21, 2013 | Leave a Comment

Scientists at Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, have developed thin film solar cells on flexible polymer foils with a new record efficiency of 20.4% for converting sunlight into electricity. The new Swiss cells are based on the semiconducting material copper indium gallium (di)selenide (CIGS) that’s already known for its potential [...]

Jan

11

Discovery of an Efficient Solar Cell

January 11, 2013 | Leave a Comment

An international team of scientists working at Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Light Source (ALS), a premier source of X-ray and ultraviolet light beams for research, found that for highly efficient polymer/organic photovoltaic cells, size matters. Organic polymer-based photovoltaic cells are far less expensive to manufacture than silicon-based solar cells.  Scientists have long believed that the key [...]

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