News about Solar, Wind and alternative green power technologies

A recent progress in manipulating nanoparticles has boosted the effectiveness of organic solar cells. The performance of organic solar cells has been enhanced with around 2 percent through the use of quantum dots (cadmium selenide). This has been achieved by Scientists from Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK) together with Freiburg Material Research Center (FMF).

The improvement was well above expected rates of 1 to 1.8 percent according the research team. The photoactive layer of these hybrid solar cells are constituted by both a mixture of inorganic nano-particles and organic polymer. This research proves that there is a great possibility to further increase the capacity of organic solar cells. The approach has already been patented as it was published in Journal of “Applied Physics Letters”.

3rd Generation of Solar cells

In the 3rd generation of solar cells we have organic solar cells which are in a development phase. This is a technology which uses organic materials in the photoactive layer. Actually, 7 percent of the layers are construed by wet chemicals. Moreover, organic solar cells are much more powerful than contemporary silicon cells. They are more flexible, thinner, cheaper and can be produced rapidly. This makes it very suitable for pervasive use to power devices, sensors and other electrical appliances. These organic solar cells can in the near future substitute the use of cables and batteries.

The powerful organic solar cells have been developed by a group of expert physicians, engineers, chemists from FMF and IMTEK.

According to the leader of the research Dr. Michael Krüger, the advancement of the research was achieved quickly as experts in different fields teamed together. The process of the project was conducted from synthesis of nano-particles to including these materials into the surface layer of the cells. The experts in ‘Nanoscience’ were the group from IMTEK, which was led by Dr. Gerald Urban.

A deal of the research was actually sponsored by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. The technology in research & development must further be refined as well as improved in terms of durability and production cost. This will make it more marketable.

This project is called: Quantum Dot Polymer Hybrids as Photoactive Material in Solar Cells and it is also being funded by German Research Foundation via IMTEK research training group which is; Micro Energy Harvesting.

Source: Science Daily