Tapping Solar Power With Perovskites. Ordinary lab equipment is all that’s required to make Perovskite solar cells.
Credit: C&EN Every now and again, a well-studied research topic explodes with new life. Long after carbon materials filled chapters of dated textbooks, for example, that field’s soul was reenergized around 1990 after buckyballs and carbon nanotubes were discovered. It happened again in that field about a half-dozen years ago when graphene took the world by storm.
It’s happening now in photovoltaics.
Light Trapping Coatings. Multi-junction Solar Cells. Graphene. Thin Solar Panels. Organic Solar Cells. Other Ideas. How to tap the sun’s energy through heat as well as light. A new approach to harvesting solar energy, developed by MIT researchers, could improve efficiency by using sunlight to heat a high-temperature material whose infrared radiation would then be collected by a conventional photovoltaic cell.
This technique could also make it easier to store the energy for later use, the researchers say. In this case, adding the extra step improves performance, because it makes it possible to take advantage of wavelengths of light that ordinarily go to waste. The process is described in a paper published this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, written by graduate student Andrej Lenert, associate professor of mechanical engineering Evelyn Wang, physics professor Marin Soljačić, principal research scientist Ivan Celanović, and three others.
A conventional silicon-based solar cell “doesn’t take advantage of all the photons,” Wang explains.