Skip to main content

Bumpy nanoparticles improve the efficiency of thin-film solar cells

By


Researchers from Australia's Swinburne University of Technology - along with colleagues from Suntech Power Holdings - have announced the development of the world's most efficient broadband nanoplasmonic solar cells. The scientists improved the performance of existing thin-film cells by incorporating nucleated or "bumpy" gold and silver nanoparticles. By doing so, they were able to boost the cells' absolute efficiency up to 8.1 percent.
The team at Swinburne's Victoria-Suntech Advanced Solar Facility (VSASF) had already been embedding conventional gold and silver nanoparticles into thin-film cells produced by Suntech. These highly-reflective particles increased the wavelength of absorbed sunlight, thus improving the rate at which its photons were converted into electrons.
The uneven surfaces of the bumpy nanoparticles, however, scatter the light even farther into a broadband wavelength range. This reportedly results in even greater absorption, thus improving the cells' overall efficiency. The scientists hope to get the efficiency up to at least 10 percent by the middle of this year, and ultimately want to "develop solar cells that are twice as efficient and run at half the cost of those currently available."
The embedding process is apparently quite simple and inexpensive, so it could easily be added to the existing production process. Suntech plans on mass-producing the improved solar cells, and expects them to be commercially available by 2017.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wind Turbines

By
The Bahrain World Trade Center is the first skyscraper to have wind turbines integrated into the structure of the building.Three large wind turbines are suspended between two office towers. The towers are aerodynamically tapered to funnel wind and draw air into the turbines. This airfoil tapering allows the wind to enter the turbines at a perpendicular angle and increases air speed as much as 30 percent in each of the 95 ft wide turbine rotors. The turbines supply about 15 percent of the electricity used by the skyscraper - approximately the same amount of electricity used by 300 homes. Source: www.norwin.dk
Post a Comment
Read more

10 URLs to Find Out What Google Knows About You

By
Google is much more than just a search giant. It is also home to many of your favorite products: Gmail, YouTube, and Chrome, just to name a few. Apart from that, it also offers many products to help you  keep track of your data . Most of these are  hidden deep  inside the My Account dashboard, which many users don’t really know of. These hidden tools  may reveal interesting details  about your usage of Google’s many services. We’ve compiled a list of important Google URLs of some  hidden tools  that carry information of what you did with Google, mostly from the searches that you have made on their many products, the voice searches and typed out Google searches that you have made. Are you ready to  find out what how Google knows about you ? 1.  Google Dashboard Google Dashboard offers  transparency and control over the personal data stored with your Google Account. You can  view  and  manage the data gener...
Post a Comment
Read more

New record energy efficiency for artificial photosynthesis

By
As the world moves towards developing new avenues of renewable energy, the efficiencies of producing fuels such as hydrogen must increase to the point that they rival or exceed those of conventional energy sources to make them a viable alternative. Now researchers at Monash University in Melbourne claim to have created a solar-powered device that produces hydrogen at a world-record 22 percent efficiency, which is a significant step towards making cheap, efficient hydrogen production a reality. Efficiency records for solar-powered hydrogen production have continued to rise over the years, and much more rapidly as the technology and techniques improve. Even as late as December last year  Gizmag reported  a solar-driven hydrogen record efficiency at the time of just 12.3 percent, so this new record shows a very healthy 10 percent improvement on that and beats out the previous record of 18 percent. Splitting water using electricity to produce hydrogen and oxygen has been a...
Post a Comment
Read more