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Category: solar power

Unlike conventional silicon-based solar cells, perovskite solar cells (PSCs) are not only thin and lightweight, but can also be seamlessly applied to curved surfaces, like building facades and vehicle roofs. What’s more, they can be easily manufactured at room temperature using a solution process, leading to significantly reduced production costs.

However, for PSCs to achieve commercialization, it is crucial to develop technologies that maintain high efficiency over extended periods. A research team affiliated with UNIST has successfully made strides in this area. Their work is published in the journal Joule.

Professor Sang Il Seok of the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST, along with researchers Jongbeom Kim and Jaewang Park, has developed an interlayer that leverages the specificity of organic cations on the surface of PSCs, simultaneously achieving and durability.

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Researchers from the Chair of Optics and Photonics of Condensed Matter led by Prof. Dr. Carsten Deibel at the Chemnitz University of Technology and other partner institutions are currently working on solar cells made from novel organic semiconductors that can be produced using established printing processes. The scientists are collaborating interdisciplinarily to fundamentally understand these photovoltaic cells in order to further improve them.

“Organic solar cells can be produced very easily and cheaply using printing processes,” says Deibel. In contrast to established made of , however, the current flow in is very slow.

“Due to the production of the solar cells from a kind of ink, the organic, light-absorbing layers are very disordered. Therefore, the current flow is very slow,” explains Deibel. A consequence of the slow transport of light-generated electrons and holes is the so-called transport resistance, which reduces the fill factor of the solar cells and thus the power.

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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a new technology to manufacture solar cells.

Solar energy is growing rapidly in the United States. In 2010, it accounted for 0.1% of electrical generation in the country and has increased to over 6% in 2024. By 2029, solar is slated to become the largest source of renewable energy.

Most commercial solar panels are made from silicon. Producing solar panels like this is energy-intensive and can be difficult to do within the United States. For solar to take off more in the United States, we need to find a less expensive, more available material.

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Photovoltaic (PV) solutions, which are designed to convert sunlight into electrical energy, are becoming increasingly widespread worldwide. Over the past decades, engineers specialized in energy solutions have been trying to identify new solar cell designs and PV materials that could achieve even better power conversion efficiencies, while also retaining their stability and reliably operating for long periods of time.

The many emerging PV solutions that have proven to be particularly promising include tandem based on both perovskites (a class of materials with a characteristic crystal structure) and organic materials. Perovskite/organic tandem solar cells could be more affordable than existing silicon-based solar cells, while also yielding higher power conversion efficiencies.

These solar cells are manufactured using wide-bandgap perovskites, which have an electronic bandgap greater than 1.6 electronvolts (eV) and can thus absorb higher-energy photons. Despite their enhanced ability to absorb high-energy light particles, these materials have significant limitations, which typically adversely impact the stability of solar cells.

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Researchers have developed a new material that, by harnessing the power of sunlight, can clear water of dangerous pollutants. Created through a combination of soft chemistry gels and electrospinning—a technique where electrical force is applied to liquid to craft small fibers—the team constructed thin fiber-like strips of titanium dioxide (TiO₂), a compound often utilized in solar cells, gas sensors and various self-cleaning technologies.

Despite being a great alternative energy source, solar fuel systems that utilize TiO₂ nanoparticles are often power-limited because they can only undergo photocatalysis, or create , by absorbing non-visible UV light. This can cause significant challenges to implementation, including low efficiency and the need for complex filtration systems.

Yet when researchers added copper to the material to improve this process, their new structures, called nanomats, were able to absorb enough light energy to break down harmful pollutants in air and water, said Pelagia-Iren Gouma, lead author of the study and a professor of materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University.

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Cadmium-based nanostructures are opening new possibilities in near-infrared (NIR) technology, from medical imaging to fiber optics and solar energy.

A major challenge in their development is controlling their atomic structure with precision, which researchers at HZDR and TU Dresden tackled using cation exchange. This technique allows for precise manipulation of nanostructure composition, unlocking new optical and electronic properties. The research highlights the crucial role of active corners and defects, which influence charge transport and light absorption. By linking these nanostructures into organized systems, scientists are paving the way for self-assembling materials with advanced functions, from improved sensors to next-generation electronics.

Harnessing Near-Infrared Light with Cadmium-Based Nanostructures.

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A team of physicists, engineers, opticians and photonics specialists at Zhejiang University, in China, working with a pair of colleagues from the University of Cambridge, in the U.K., has found a way to make pixels smaller by using perovskite. In their paper published in the journal Nature, the group describes how they used the mineral to create pixels as small as a virus.

As the research team notes, the rallying cry for electronics in the modern age is to add more technology to ever smaller base units. For computers, for many years, the goal was to double the number of transistors on a single integrated circuit. Similarly, reducing the size of pixels in has led to sharper and sharper imagery.

The current standard for digital display technology is micro-LED, which is based on II-V semiconductors. Unfortunately, such technology becomes too expensive and inefficient to make pixels any smaller than the size currently in use. This led the team to wonder if a different base material might allow the creation of smaller pixels that would be both cost-effective and efficient. They turned to , the same mineral that is currently being investigated as a replacement for silicon in as a way to reduce costs.

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Increasing energy demands and problems associated with burning fossil fuels have heightened interest in more sustainable energy sources, such as sunlight. But there are still areas where carbon-based fuel remains the standard, such as in the aviation industry. To address this need, scientists have been working to devise a way to use sunlight to generate solar-thermal heating that could then drive the chemical reactions that are needed to make jet fuel with net-zero carbon emissions.

Now, a team at Caltech that is part of a Department of Energy (DOE) Energy Innovation Hub known as the Liquid Sunlight Alliance, or LiSA, has developed such a solar-thermal heating system on a small scale and demonstrated that it can successfully drive an important reaction for jet fuel production.

Completely powered by solar energy, the so-called photothermocatalytic reactor incorporates a spectrally selective solar absorber to maximize the generation of solar-thermal heating. The modular design of the reactor takes advantage of current fabrication technologies and existing silicon solar panel production infrastructure.

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