Solar Cells Boosted By This One Weird Trick (Spoiler Alert: Fish Oil)
Fish oil can help boost the efficiency of systems that combine excess heat recovery with solar cells.
solar cell research
Plastic Solar Cells Get Boost From Disorder
Original article posted on Stanford News. By Mark Shwartz Scientists have spent decades trying to build flexible plastic solar cells efficient enough to compete with conventional cells made of silicon. To boost performance, research groups have tried creating new plastic materials that enhance the flow of electricity through the solar … [continued]
Fluorescent Solar Cells The Future?
This article was originally published on the Yale News website. For some solar cells, the future may be fluorescent. Scientists at Yale have improved the ability of a promising type of solar cell to absorb light and convert it into electrical power by adding a fluorescent organic dye to the … [continued]
Printing Australia’s Largest Solar Cells
This article was originally published on the website of CSIRO. Scientists have produced the largest flexible, plastic solar cells in Australia – 10 times the size of what they were previously able to – thanks to a new solar cell printer that has been installed at CSIRO. The printer has … [continued]
Solar Cell Material Created From Microwave Oven
Another fun solar science story, this one via the University of Utah: University of Utah metallurgists used an old microwave oven to produce a nanocrystal semiconductor rapidly using cheap, abundant and less toxic metals than other semiconductors. They hope it will be used for more efficient photovoltaic solar cells and … [continued]
New Plasmonic Polymer Solar Cells Achieve Record Efficiency Of 8.92%
A new polymer solar cells designed by researchers at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology has achieved a record for the highest efficiency of any plasmonic PSCs that utilize metal nanoparticles. The new record is not far off of the 10% conversion efficiency level that the researchers think … [continued]
First All-Carbon Solar Cell Created
The first solar cell made entirely out of carbon has been created by researchers from Stanford University. This technological breakthrough is offering the possibility of cheap, practical alternatives to the sometimes rather expensive materials used in current solar cells. “Carbon has the potential to deliver high performance at a … [continued]
New High-Efficiency Quantum Dot Solar Cells Developed
The first solar cell with an external quantum efficiency (EQE) that exceeds 100 percent for photons with energies in the solar range has been created. With these new solar cells, every blue photon that is absorbed can generate up to 30 percent more current than with current technologies. The … [continued]
Solar Cells Could Receive Huge Boost in Efficiency Thanks to Next-Gen Antireflection Coatings
Solar cell efficiency is set to greatly increase in the next few years thanks to newly created next-gen antireflection coatings. The new nanomaterial coatings will help to limit the amount of light that is reflected away by the surfaces of solar cells. In the past few years, materials with … [continued]
Solar Cell Degradation Research Can Improve Thin Film Solar Panels
The Laboratory for Photovoltaics at the University of Luxembourg has recently devised a new method to observe the causes of and prevent solar cell degradation before solar cell production is even finished. This will have huge effects on the solar cell manufacturing industry because of how fast chemical damage … [continued]
