The material was developed by a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University at the Advanced Photon Source housed at the United States Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
A solar power design using ceramic material could prove to be the key to providing cheaper solar power.
The new material is capable of harnessing energy from both visible and infrared light, allowing it to absorb six times more energy than conventional photovoltaic materials and transfer a photocurrent 50 times denser.
The material was developed by a team of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University at the Advanced Photon Source housed at the United States Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory.
“This family of materials is all the more remarkable because it is comprised of inexpensive, non-toxic and earth-abundant elements, unlike compound semiconductor materials currently used in efficient thin-film solar cell technology,” said Jonathan Spanier, a team member from Drexel’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
The material uses perovskite crystals made with a combination of potassium niobate and barium nickel niobate. By adjusting the percentages of the component elements of the material, the team found that they could reduce the bandgap level or just how much energy is needed to induce conduction.
The new ceramic materials have three other characteristics that make them ideal for the solar panels of the future. The first two have to do with the material’s ability to bring down solar panel costs while the third is a characteristic inherent to the material which improves its efficiency.
First of all, a solar panel made from the new material can be thinner than current panels. Because of its high efficiency, panels can use less material without diminishing energy generation. Secondly, the ceramic-based materials are cheaper than current photovoltaic material.
The third advantage this material gives is it is ferroelectric, which means it can switch polarity. This will allow it to exceed the theorized energy efficiency limits of today’s solar materials.
One reason for the relatively low efficiency of solar panels is that particles collected from the sun enter a solar cell and then spread out in all directions. In order to control the flow, make all the particles go in one direction, most solar cells use layers of different channeling material. As the particle go through these layers, some get lost, decreasing the energy efficiency of the solar cell.
The new design uses fewer layers to channel the particles and harnesses the ferroelectric properties of the ceramic material to use up less energy channeling the particles. Further tuning of the material’s composition should further expand efficiency, the scientists believe.
The study of the materials was led by professor Andrew Rappe and research specialist Ilya Grinberg of the Department of Chemistry in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences with Peter Davis of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and Mr. Spanier of Drexel University. – EcoSeed Staff
