Solar Technologies Upcoming - Innovations

New technology makes solar panels 70% more efficient

Thermally enhanced photoluminescence for heat harvesting in photovoltaics

Researchers at Technion Israel Institute of Technology recently made a breakthrough in solar

cell technology that could boost efficiency of existing photovoltaics by 70 percent or more.
The amount of sunlight solar cells can convert into usable energy is typically limited to
around 30 percent, with many existing solar panels falling short of that due to less than
optimal conditions. The Technion team developed new thermodynamic tools that work
to capture energy currently lost and therby increasing a slolar cells efficiency to as much as
50%

Sources:https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13167
 Solar Technologies Upcoming - Innovations
New technology makes solar panels 70% more efficient

The university research team, based in Haifa, Israel, has been working to improve
solar cell efficiency as a means to increase the benefits of clean, renewable sources
of energy. They created a photoluminescence material that absorbs radiation from
the sun, and converts the heat and light from the sun into an ideal radiation.
That illuminates the photovoltaic cell and enables a higher conversion efficiency.
The net result is a big boost: a conventional solar cells 30 percent efficiency rate is
increased to 50 percent.

Solar radiation, on its way to the photovoltaic cells, hits a dedicated material that
we developed for this purpose, the material is heated by the unused part of the
spectrum, In addition, the solar radiation in the optimal spectrum is absorbed and
re-emitted at a blue-shifted spectrum. This radiation is then harvested by the solar
cell. This way both the heat and the light are converted to electricity.

The team continues to work on their innovation, and is targeting a commercial

product release within the next five years. The results of the study were recently
published in the journal Nature Communications.
 Solar Technologies Upcoming - Innovations

New technology makes solar panels 30% more efficient

Solar cell efficiencies could increase by 30 percent or more with new hybrid materials that
make use of the infrared portion of the solar spectrum, researchers say.

Visible light accounts for under half of the solar energy that reaches Earth's surface. Nearly
all of the rest comes from infrared radiation. However, solar infrared rays normally passes
right through the photovoltaic materials that make up today's solar cells.

Now scientists at the University of California, Riverside, have created hybrid materials that
can make use of solar infrared rays. The energy from every two infrared rays they capture is
combined or upconverted into a higher-energy photon that is readily absorbed by
photovoltaic cells, generating electricity from light that would normally be wasted.

Sources: https://www.engadget.com/2015/07/28/solar-energy-from-infrared-light/
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/issues/july-2015-online/researchers-tap- infrared-
spectrum-to-improve-solar-cell-efficiency/
 Solar Technologies Upcoming - Innovations

The hybrid materials are combinations of inorganic semiconductor nanocrystals,

which capture the infrared photons, and organic molecules, which help combine
the energy from these photons together into an upconverted photon. In
experiments, lead selenide nanocrystals captured near-infrared photons, and the
organic compound rubrene emitted visible yellow-orange photons.
 Solar Technologies Upcoming - Innovations
The researchers noted that lead selenide nanocrystals and rubrene were relatively
inefficient at upconversion. However, in experiments with a hybrid material made of
cadmium selenide nanocrystals and the organic compound diphenylanthracene, which
absorbs green light and emits violet light, the investigators could boost upconversion up
to a thousandfold by coating the nanocrystals with anthracene, a component of coal tar.

This suggests that similar coatings on lead selenide nanocrystals might boost their
upconversion efficiency as well
The scientists added that the ability to upconvert two low energy photons into one,
high-energy photon has potential applications in biological imaging, high-density data
storage, and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). They detailed their findings online
July 10 in the journal Nano Letters

Before such research can bear fruit, Prof. Bardeen told me that his team needs to boost
the efficiency of the infrared-to-visible conversion to 10 percent or more. It also has to
occur in a solid-state material rather than the liquid solutions. If we accomplish both
those steps, then we can envision adding an upconversion coating to standard solar
cells that are already commercial products." He said efforts so far are "promising," but
we need to add the usual caveats about solar energy research - not much of it ends up
being commercialized.