Lifeboat Foundation

The electrification of heating systems could play a significant role in building decarbonization. Heat pumps are emerging as a solution.

Iranian scientists have demonstrated a multi-layer silicon nanoparticle (SNP) solar cell based on nanoparticles that are densely stacked inside a dielectric medium. They considered different SNP structures and configurations to tailor these particles as a p–n junction cell.

“This is because SNPs are assumed to be the main absorber in the cell. Thus, any distance between them reduces the absorption of incident photons,” the group said.

They considered different SNP structures and configurations to tailor these particles as a p–n junction cell. They said this kind of cell could achieve a theoretical efficiency of around 11%.

Tiny crystals, known as quantum dots, have enabled an international team to achieve a quantum efficiency exceeding 100 percent in the photocurrent generated in a hybrid inorganic-organic semiconductor.

Perovskites are exciting semiconductors for light-harvesting applications and have already shown some impressive performances in solar cells. But improvements in photo-conversion efficiency are necessary to take this technology to a broader market.

Light comes in packets of energy known as photons. When a semiconductor absorbs a photon, the electromagnetic energy is transferred to a negatively charged electron and its positively charged counterpart, known as a hole. An electric field can sweep these particles in opposite directions, thereby allowing a current to flow. This is the basic operation of a solar cell. It might sound simple, but optimizing the quantum efficiency, or getting as many electron-hole pairs from the incoming photons as possible, has been a long-standing goal.

Swiss researchers have done the (theoretically) impossible, creating not one but two silicon-based solar cells with efficiencies greater than 30% — breaking a world record and potentially illuminating the path to a future of cheaper clean energy.

The status quo: Solar cells absorb light and convert it into electricity. They’re the basis of most solar power tech, and about 95% of them are made from silicon because it’s abundant, long-lasting, and relatively cheap.

Most of the silicon solar cells sold today are about 22% efficient, meaning they convert 22% of the solar energy that hits them into electricity. We don’t have too much room for improvement with silicon solar cells, either, as they have a theoretical efficiency limit of about 29%.

Thirty seconds of sunlight could boost the battery life of future smartwatches and other wearables by tens of minutes, thanks to a renewable and rechargeable battery prototype developed by the University of Surrey.

Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) has demonstrated how its new photo-rechargeable system, which merges zinc-ion batteries with perovskite solar cells, could allow wearables to spring back to life without the need to plug in.

Jinxin Bi, a Ph.D. candidate at ATI and the first author of the paper, says that “this technology provides a promising strategy for efficient use of clean energy and enables wearable electronics to be operated continuously without plug-in charging. Our prototype could represent a step forward to how we interact with wearables and other internet-of-things devices, such as remote real-time health monitors.”

The compact row houses feature carefully angled solar panels that harness every moment of the sun.

A new solar panel design can efficiently convert light into electricity, while still allowing almost 80% of incoming light to pass through.

Perovskites, mineral materials composed of calcium titanate, have been found to be valuable for the fabrication of high-performance solar cells. While teams of scientists and engineers worldwide have been developing and testing perovskite solar cells in laboratory settings, large-scale outdoor evaluations of these cells are still lacking.

Researchers at University of Rome Tor Vergata, the Hellenic Mediterranean University in Crete, BeDimensional S.p. A., Great Cell, the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) and University of Siena have recently manufactured large-area perovskite solar panels engineered using two-dimensional (2D) materials. They then successfully integrated 9 of these solar panels into a stand-alone solar farm, located on the Greek island of Crete. This team’s findings, presented in a paper published in Nature Energy, could facilitate and inform the future large-scale implementation of perovskite solar cells.

“Our recent paper highlights our joint research efforts for the last 5 years in the upscaling of perovskite PVs, starting from lab cells to modules, panels and finally to a solar farm infrastructure,” Francesco Bonaccorso, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told to Tech Xplore. “This project was specifically developed in the context of the European Graphene Flagship initiative, which established a close collaboration between University Tor Vergata, BeDimensional S.p. A., GreatCell and Hellenic Mediterranean University, having both complementary and widely different skillsets.”

Perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are promising solar technologies. Although low-cost wet processing has shown advantages in small-area PSC fabrication, the preparation of uniform charge transport layers with thickness of several nanometers from solution for meter-sized large area products is still challenging.

Recently, a research group led by Prof. LIU Shengzhong from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has developed a facile surface redox engineering (SRE) strategy for vacuum-deposited NiO x to match the slot-die-coated perovskite, and fabricated high-performance large-area perovskite submodules.

This work was published in Joule (“Surface redox engineering of vacuum-deposited NiO x for top-performance perovskite solar cells and modules”).