The increasing demand for solar technology is something that will also increase the demand for continuing technological breakthroughs in the solar industry. Because of this, chances are that we’ll see some interesting developments happening much quicker than we’re used to in the past when demand hasn’t been as high.
These kinds of developments are part of what makes solar technology so exciting right now, and chances are a few years from now, we’ll have seen previously unimagined advances in technology become commonplace.
This could possibly be one of those instances, as it’s something that could possibly be a game-changer. Below is an excerpt from an article found on phys.org about solar research being done at one of the nation’s top universities. Check it out…
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Researchers at Northwestern University have now developed a new design for organic solar cells that could lead to more efficient, less expensive solar power. Instead of attempting to increase efficiency by altering the thickness of the solar cell’s polymer layer—a tactic that has preciously garnered mixed results—the researchers sought to design the geometric pattern of the scattering layer to maximize the amount of time light remained trapped within the cell.
Using a mathematical search algorithm based on natural evolution, the researchers pinpointed a specific geometrical pattern that is optimal for capturing and holding light in thin-cell organic solar cells.
The resulting design exhibited a three-fold increase over the Yablonovitch Limit, a thermodynamic limit developed in the 1980s that statistically describes how long a photon can be trapped in a semiconductor.
A paper about the results, “Highly Efficient Light-Trapping Structure Design Inspired by Natural Evolution,” was published January 3 in Scientific Reports, a publication of Nature.
In the newly designed organic solar cell, light first enters a 100-nanometer-thick “scattering layer,” a geometrically-patterned dielectric layer designed to maximize the amount of light transmitted into the cell. The light is then transmitted to the active layer, where it is converted into electricity.
“We wanted to determine the geometry for the scattering layer that would give us optimal performance,” said Cheng Sun, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science and co-author of the paper. “But with so many possibilities, it’s difficult to know where to start, so we looked to laws of natural selection to guide us.”
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To read the rest of this piece, head to the full article here: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-evolution-efficient-solar-cell-geometric.html