Solar Research
| 29 August 2012
The energy company Phillips 66 in collaboration with South China University of Technology (SCUT) and California startup Solarmer Energy Inc. has developed organic photovoltaic (OPV) cells that set a new world record for energy conversion efficiency in this category: 9.31%.
| 23 August 2012
The U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California Berkeley have discovered a new way to make high-efficiency, low-cost photovoltaics from virtually any semiconductor — even materials previously considered unsuitable for solar cells. The technology, called screening-engineered field-effect photovoltaics (or SFPV), involves doping semiconductors by applying an electric field through a nanostructured electrode.
| 13 August 2012
Scientists at the University of Toronto, Canada, and the King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia collaboratively have created a colloidal quantum dot (CQD) thin-film solar cell with a certified world-record efficiency of 7%. The 37% increase over the previous certified world record was made possible by a technical advance called “hybrid passivation scheme”.
| 09 August 2012
At Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), several pilot plants of solar cells, small wind power plants, lithium-ion batteries, and power electronics are under construction to demonstrate how load peaks in the grid can be balanced and what regenerative power supply by an isolated network may look like in the future. “High-performance batteries on the basis of lithium ions can already be applied reasonably in the grid today,” says Dr. Andreas Gutsch, coordinator of the Competence E project.
| 08 August 2012
An interdisciplinary group of researchers from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the US developed a high-performance polymer solar cell (PSC) that is highly transparent in the visible light range and produces energy by absorbing near-infrared and infrared radiation from the solar spectrum.
| 03 August 2012
Researchers at The University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona (US) have pioneered a new technology for making highly concentrating solar mirrors for concentrating solar power (CSP). With $1.5 million US from the US Department of Energy (DOE), the University’s Steward Observatory Mirror Laboratory, the same lab that builds the world’s largest mirrors for astronomical telescopes, now aims to optimise the mirror production process for cost-efficient mass production and extend it to solar thermal applications.
| 31 July 2012
Heat from the sun is typically seen as detrimental to a solar cell. Over time, devices degrade and become less efficient. But research at the Michigan Technological University (MTU) on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (US) now indicates that purposefully heating up an amorphous silicon solar cell once a day for one hour could actually increase its performance in a hybrid solar thermal PV application.
| 18 July 2012
A team from the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, may have invented the most transparent, lightweight and flexible material ever for conducting electricity. Called GraphExeter, the material could revolutionise wearable electronic devices, such as electronic clothing, and pave the way to much more efficient photovoltaics.
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- Modeling of Disordered Materials
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- Exciton Research Rewrites Design Rules for Polymers
- Advancing Electricity-Generating Window Coatings
- "Star Material" Boosts Dye-Sensitised Solar Cells 25%
- Can Proton-Coupled Electron Transfer Boost Solar Cell Efficiency?
- Impurities Affect Efficiency of CIGS Solar Cells
- Leaky Grätzel Cell Problem May be Solved
