What this means is that they don’t need an additional layer of polymer to hold the nanotubes together. Since the cells only use small amounts of purified carbon, the end product is lighter and presumably more efficient. The new cell also uses what is known as C60 or Buckminsterfullerene, another type of carbon.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, even though the new all-carbon solar cells are able to capture near-infrared light energy, they still suffer from the same lack of efficiency as their predecessors. The proof of concept devices have only achieved 0.1 percent efficiency thus far, but scientists have already identified some areas for improvement. For instance, they’ve noticed that homogenous mixtures of carbon nanotubes are more efficient than heterogeneous mixtures.

This is “fundamentally a new kind of photovoltaic cell,” says MIT professor Michael Strano. I wonder if they could start pasting these onto the roofs of electric or hybrid cars.

[Source]

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Ahnood’s system uses solar cells in the screens to harness some of this lost energy. This system currently has only about an 11% efficiency, far from what is needed to make this technology worthy of helping expand battery life, but it is a start.

Anhood believes that this efficiency can eventually be increased with further research, to a point that this could improve the average battery life for a smartphone by several hours. He believes the efficiency can be increased significantly, to the point where this system could extend battery life by a few hours. If this technology proves cheap and efficient enough, even thirty or forty more minutes would be a welcome addition for most smart phones out there. And who wouldn’t want a solar cell in their phone?

[ source ]

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3D printers nowadays are pretty impressive. They can print off keys, bathing suits, jewelry, even glass bowls using sand.  Where have a brilliant team of engineers from Oregon State University decided to take 3D printing? The researches claim to have managed to print solar cells using inkjet printing.  They also say that their process reduces raw material waste by 90 per cent, which significantly lowers the cost of producing solar cells with present day technolgoy. Some of the materials used for more advanced solar cells, such as indium, are very expensive and can’t afford to be wasted. The researchers focused on a compound named chalcopyrite, or “CIGS” for the copper, indium, gallium and selenium elements of which it’s composed. It is perfectly suited for thin-film solar cells, and using it results in little waste. A layer of chalcopyrite one or two microns thick has the ability to capture the energy the photon energy of the sun about as efficiently as a 50-micron-thick layer made with silicon.

Using inkjet technology, the team was able to print out CIGS-based solar cells that could convert light into power with an efficiency of five per cent. While still not yet enough to power a modern solar panel, the researchers are working on improving the efficiency. It’d be pretty awesome if a row of inkjet printers could churn out affordable solar cells. While we won’t see the printers at Staples anytime soon, the scientists are working on achieving an efficiency of 12 per cent, which would compete with modern solar cells.  Why not break that standard too?

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Researchers at Purdue University have successfully implemented their ultrafast laser scribing technique for thin-film solar cells, a promising innovation that may bring down production costs and boost efficiency of photovoltaics.

Solar panels have long been flat and solid, limiting their placement and usage over the years. But thin-film solar cells are rapidly gaining ground in the market, as the flexible cells can be used as rooftop shingles and tiles, building facades, or glazing on skylights.

The problem with thin film so far has been manufacturing costs and efficiency, both of which are the direct result of the “microchannels” in solar cells. The microchannels, which interconnect solar panels with one another to generate usable amounts of electricity, have traditionally been created using a mechanical stylus – a slow process that often creates imperfect, inefficient cells.

“Production costs of solar cells have been greatly reduced by making them out of thin films instead of wafers, but it is difficult to create high-quality microchannels in these thin films,” said Yung Shin, mechanical engineering professor and director of Purdue University’s Center for Laser-Based Manufacturing. “The mechanical scribing methods in commercial use do not create high-quality, well-defined channels. Although laser scribing has been studied extensively, until now we haven’t been able to precisely control lasers to accurately create the microchannels to the exacting specifications required.”

But the team’s ultrashort pulse laser and its “cold ablation” process has overcome that boundary. The laser uses pulses that only last a quadrillionth of a second, creating precise microchannels very quickly without causing enough heat to damage the film.

“It creates very clean microchannels on the surface of each layer,” said Shin. “You can do this at very high speed, meters per second, which is not possible with a mechanical scribe. This is very tricky because the laser must be precisely controlled so that it penetrates only one layer of the thin film at a time, and the layers are extremely thin. You can do that with this kind of laser because you have a very precise control of the depth, to about 10 to 20 nanometers.

“The efficiency of solar cells depends largely on how accurate your scribing of microchannels is,” added Shin. “If they are made as accurately as possibly, efficiency goes up.”

Thin-film solar cells account for about 20 per cent of watts generated in the photovoltaic market globally, and are expected to account for 31 per cent by 2013. Though, that number may rise quickly once the pulse-laser technique is refined and commercialized over the course of their study.

Their work is being funded by a three-year $425,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

[Daily Tech via Purdue]

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