Absorption boost for ultra-thin solar panels
Researchers from the UK and the Netherlands have developed an ultra-thin solar cell that increases the absorption rate by 25%. The team is now looking for commercial partners to industrialise the technology.
The solar panels developed by teams at the University of Surrey, Imperial College London and AMOLF in Amsterdam are just 1μm thick and have an absorption of 66.5% at 26.3 mA/cm2, a 25% increase on the previous record of 19.72 mA/cm2 achieved in 2017.
The panel uses a disordered honeycomb layer on top of a wafer of silicon. This enables light absorption from any angle and traps light inside the solar cell, enabling more energy to be generated.
The efficiency of conversion at 15% across the 400 to 1050 nm frequency bands is still lower than for thicker cells with multiple contacts, but the team sees that further improvements to up to 33.8 mA/cm2 by incorporating a back-reflector and improved antireflection to enable a photovoltaic efficiency above 21%. This would be significantly better than many commercially available photovoltaics, and the ultrathin cell is key for high volume applications in roll-to-roll systems and where light weigh tis essential, such as aerospace and space systems.
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“One of the challenges of working with silicon is that nearly a third of light bounces straight off it without being absorbed and the energy harnessed. A textured layer across the silicon helps tackle this and our disordered, yet hyperuniform, honeycomb design is particularly successful,” said Dr Marian Florescu from the University of Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI).
“There’s enormous potential for using ultra-thin photovoltaics. For example, given how light they are, they will be particularly useful in space and could make new extra-terrestrial projects viable,” she said. Since they use so much less silicon, we are hoping there will be cost savings here on Earth as well, plus there could be potential to bring more benefits from the Internet of Things and to create zero-energy buildings powered locally.”
As well as benefiting solar power generation, the findings could also benefit other industries where light management and surface engineering are crucial, for example, photo-electrochemistry, solid-state light emission and photodetectors.
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