SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
https://newatlas.com/energy/domes-solar-cells-boost-efficiency-two-thirds/
Solar cell efficiency may get a bump from bumps. New research suggests that building tiny domes into the surface of organic solar cells could boost their efficiency by up to two-thirds, while capturing light from a wider angle.
Solar cells are usually flat, which maximizes how much of the surface is exposed to sunlight at any given time. This design works best when the Sun is within a certain angle, so the panels are usually tilted between 15 and 40 degrees to get the most out of the day.
Scientists have toyed with other shapes for the surface, including embedding spherical nanoshells of silica which trap and circulate sunlight to allow the device to capture more energy from it. For the new study, scientists at Abdullah Gül University in Türkiye ran complex simulations of how dome-shaped bumps might boost organic solar surfaces.
The team studied photovoltaic cells made with an organic polymer called P3HT:ICBA as the active layer, above a layer of aluminum and a substrate of PMMA, capped off with a transparent protective layer of indium tin oxide (ITO). This sandwich structure was kept through the whole dome, or "hemispherical shell" as the team calls it.
...
Compared to flat surfaces, solar cells dotted with bumps showed 36% and 66% improvements in light absorption, depending on the polarization of the light. Those bumps also allowed light to enter from a wider range of directions than a flat surface, providing an angular coverage of up to 82 degrees.
Journal Reference:
Dooyoung Hah, Hemispherical-shell-shaped organic photovoltaic cells for absorption enhancement and improved angular coverage, Journal of Photonics for Energy, Vol. 14, Issue 1, 018501 (February 2024). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JPE.14.018501
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 22 2024, @06:14PM (2 children)
As I understand it, the "radioactive batteries" that pop up every decade or so since the 1950s, capture electrons (beta particles) in pits, the better the pit the better the electron capture.
I'm sure there are more than a few manufacturing challenges for making square meters of photon capturing surfaces "bumpy" or "pitty", but if they are even getting a 33% increase in daily kWh captured that would (obviously) be worth more than a 33% increase in panel manufacturing costs, quite a bit more in space limited applications.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Thursday February 22 2024, @07:18PM (1 child)
Beta cells work best effective when engineered into capacitors. Collect and store.
But that simple fact was already known about 120 years ago. I don't understand why educated people are systematically forgetting their own key technologies.
I call this phenomenon "zazdívání" [English: 'walling up'], since to me it looks similar to walling naughty nuns and is obviously intentional by cults. Including the cult of Academy.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday February 22 2024, @08:22PM
I worked in a relatively obscure corner of pulmonology throughout the 1990s. During that time we watched countless "new discovery" papers being published in the field, repeating things that had been well established by the 1970s.
I'll admit, my Masters' Thesis (which was not required to be novel) "invented" a concept which, after a couple of months of research, I found to be already on the market in a couple of commercial products. But, that was 1988 - you remember: paper card catalogs, inter-library loans of journals which take weeks to arrive... There's really no excuse these days for going through an entire academic paper authoring, submission and review process and publishing "new discoveries" of things that have been readily discovered with a few hours of research into the existing literature.
Except that: nobody cares enough to read the paper, much less do any background research on the topic. So we have this "academic explosion" of new publications, new "discoveries" (parallel problems in the patent offices), and it makes the whole field look like a bunch of frantic, over-stressed, under-appreciated, insecure wankers desperate to stay ahead of the "publish or perish" mandates of their department chairs.
🌻🌻 [google.com]