United States. The W.M. Keck Foundation awarded a million-dollar grant to a team led by chemists at the University of Texas at Austin to develop an innovative coating for silicon-based solar cells that could increase their efficiency by up to 20%, lowering the costs of solar power generation.
Efficiency is an issue in silicon-based solar cells, which currently account for about 95% of the solar energy market and are critical components from rooftop solar panels to large panels used in commercial solar farms, but only convert less than 30% of sunlight energy into electricity. About half of the energy lost is due to the generation of heat within the silicon cell.
"The goal of the project is to recover some of this energy loss by chemically attaching organic dyes to the surface of the silicon cell that reduces heat losses and converts more of that energy into electricity," explains Sean Roberts, principal investigator and assistant professor of chemistry at UT Austin.
The basic idea of using such dyes has been around for forty years, but until now, scientists have not been able to make it work. The real technical challenge is to get the pairs of excited electrons to flow into the silicon cell so that they can be collected as current.
"Our solution is to use some synthetic methods developed in Mike Rose's lab to chemically tie dyes to the silicone surface, essentially building tiny wires that can allow electrons to flow between materials," Roberts says.
"This is a risky investigation," says Daniel Jaffe, vice president of research at UT Austin. "This kind of approach has been tried before, but it has failed. That UT Austin and Keck are supporting a group of young scientists to test their hand, says we support bold and innovative work that, if successful, could have a huge reward for both science and society."
Data Source Provider: University of Texas.
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