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Experimental Stacked Organic Solar Cell is 15% Efficient

posted by Fnord666 on Monday April 30 2018, @04:21AM   
from the light-work dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Electronicsweekly.com reports

Researchers at the University of Michigan have found a way to stack solution-processed organic solar cells on top of vacuum-processed cells, creating an tandem solar cell with 15% efficiency.

"For the last couple of years, efficiency for organic photo-voltaics was stuck around 11 to 12%," said Michigan physicist Xiaozhou Che.

The top solution-processed non-fullerene-acceptor cell absorbs infra-red up to 950nm, and the bottom fullerene-based cell absorbs visible light starting at 350nm.

"By themselves, the cells achieve 10 to 11% efficiency. When we stack them together, we increase light absorption and efficiency improves to 15% with an anti-reflection coating," said Che [...]

High fabrication yield organic tandem photovoltaics combining vacuum- and solution-processed subcells with 15% efficiency (DOI: 10.1038/s41560-018-0134-z) (DX)

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Original Submission

• Re:Silicon (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @01:35PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 30 2018, @01:35PM (#673715)

  The press release [brightsurf.com] says the advantages of organic solar cells are that they're flexible and that they're cheap to manufacture.

  At 15 percent efficiency and given a 20-year lifetime, researchers estimate organic solar cells could produce electricity at a cost of less than 7 cents per kilowatt-hour. In comparison, the average cost of electricity in the U.S. was 10.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2017, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

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