Solar Cells Info

The Advanced Technology Institute (ATI) at the University of Surrey has been awarded a £200,000 grant to produce prototype solid state lighting devices using nano-composite materials.

Source:
http://www.scenta.co.uk/scenta/news.cfm

Awarded by the carbon Trust, the funding will contribute to a larger programme of development worth £465,000, which will use carbon nanotube-organic composites to fabricate ultra low energy lighting devices. The ATI believes that its Ultra Low Energy High Brightness Light (ULEHB) will require minimal power, significantly reducing both energy costs and carbon emissions.

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Photovoltaics take a load off soldiers

by
Richard Stevenson (features editor of Compound Semiconductor)

Source: Compound Semiconductor Magazine
http://compoundsemiconductor.net/articles/magazine/12/10/5/1

A US consortium is aiming to smash the solar-cell efficiency record with a radical design that uses a lateral architecture and a dispersive concentrator. If they are successful, soldiers will be freed from a 20 lb load of spare batteries. Richard Stevenson reports.

Think of solar cells and you probably think of high-tech devices powering satellites or arrays of devices in sunny climes generating electricity for the national grid. But the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has another application in mind. It believes that solar cells can be used to recharge the batteries that power a soldier’s radio, night vision goggles, GPS navigation system and other electronic gadgets, and it is supporting a program that will receive up to $53 million to develop photovoltaics with the required efficiency.

The main disadvantage of batteries is their weight. Despite advances in technology, spare batteries still account for one-fifth of a soldier’s 100 lb battlefield load, which includes a pack, weapon, protective gear and a suite of electronic gadgets. Although these batteries are used to operate devices that can save lives, the weight encumbers movement and increases vulnerability.

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RoseStreet Labs & Sumitomo Chemical Announce Joint Venture for Full Spectrum Solar Cells

Thursday October 26

source: Yahoo Business News
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/061026/lath081.html?.v=75

PHOENIX, Oct. 26 /PRNewswire/

RoseStreet Labs, LLC & Sumitomo Chemical Co. Ltd. (Sumitomo) today announced a joint venture, RSL Energy, Inc., for the development and manufacturing of full spectrum solar cells for the renewable energy markets. The joint venture will be headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona.

RSL Energy is commercializing next-generation technology utilizing full spectrum solutions that can potentially achieve practical efficiencies above 48% in both single junction and multi-junction devices. RSL Energy has exclusive patent licenses from both Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Cornell University for unique semiconductor devices that use a significantly larger fraction of the solar spectrum compared to existing products.

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26 October 2006
source:
http://www.semiconductor-today.com/news_items/OCT_06/SPECT_261006.htm

Spectrolab Inc of Sylmar, CA, USA, which became a subsidiary of Boeing in 2000, has produced its two millionth multi-junction GaAs solar cell as it celebrates its 50th anniversary this year.

Spectrolab pioneered this type of cell in 1983, putting it into production several years later. The company says that the development gave satellite operators the option of doubling satellite power and increasing potential revenue or controlling costs by reducing spacecraft size without sacrificing capability.

“I’d like to thank the US Air Force and NASA for their visionary support of Spectrolab and early adoption of the multi-junction solar cell technology,” said Spectrolab’s president David Lillington.

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Top 10 solar cell producers for the year 2005.

Organic nanowires for smaller solar cells

10 October 2006 Source: The Engineer Online
http://www.e4engineering.com/

Irish researchers have measured photoconductivity in a single polymer nanowire, a finding that could lead to inexpensive miniaturised solar cells and photo detectors.

Both devices work by converting light into electricity, and building smaller versions of the devices will rely on nanostructured materials with good photoconducting properties. The properties of inorganic photoconducting nanowires, such as ZnO or Si, have been measured, but relatively little is known about the properties of organic nanowires. Organic nanowires could be both chemically tunable and relatively inexpensive to integrate into electronic circuits.

Gareth Redmond’s group at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland has succeeded in measuring photoconductivity in a single polymer nanowire. The researchers fabricated the 200nm wide, 15µm long polymer wires using a simple template wetting technique. Metal contacts were made on either end of a single wire to measure the photo-induced current over several on–off cycles of a near-ultraviolet laser.

The wires’ quantum efficiency, or the number of current-carrying electrons produced per photon hitting the wire, is about 0.1 per cent, which is comparable with several inorganic nanowires. As in many polymer-based electronic devices, the limiting factors may be the non-crystalline structure and poor electrical contact with the metal leads.

Solar Cells Research Gets a Boost with new methods for conversion of long wavelength light to shorter wavelengths
2006-10-13 11:04:29

source: CCNews
http://www.ccnmag.com/news.php?id=4530

An innovative process that converts low-energy longwave photons (light particles) into higher-energy shortwave photons has been developed by a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in Mainz and at the Sony Materials Science Laboratory in Stuttgart. With the skillful combination of two light-active substances, the scientists have, for the first time, manipulated normal light, such as sunlight, to combine the energy in photons with particular wavelengths (Physical Review Letters, October 4, 2006). This has previously only been achieved with a similar process using high-energy density laser light. The successful outcome of this process could lay the foundation for a new generation of more efficient solar cells.

The efficiency of solar cells today is limited, among other reasons, by the fact that the longwave, low-energy part of the sunlight cannot be used. A process that increases the low level of energy in the light particles (photons) in the longwave range, shortening their wave length, would make it possible for the solar cells to use those parts of light energy that, up to now, have been lost, resulting in a drastic increase in their efficiency. The equivalent has only been achieved previously with high-energy density laser light which, under certain conditions, combines two low-energy photons into one high-energy photon – a kind of photonic fusion.

This is a significant step forward for the scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research and at the Sony Materials Science Laboratory. In developing this process, they have succeeded, for the first time, in pairing up photons from normal light, thus altering the wavelength. They used two substances in solution, platinum octaethyl porphyrin and diphenylan-thracene, which converted the longwave green light from a normal light source into shortwave blue light. Similar to the process in laser light, this also pairs up photons, but in a different way.

When a molecule is manipulated by laser light to take up two photons, which is only probable if it is literally bombarded with a laser beam of photons, the molecules in this case only receive one photon. Two photon partners are brought together between the molecules via a different mechanism called triplet-triplet annihilation. By selecting different, corresponding “matchmaker” molecules, it is possible to combine the energy from photons from the entire sunlight spectrum.

Manufacturing plants to produce solar cells at a daily rate equal to the entire solar-cell production in 1980.

By Michael Kanellos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
SAN JOSE, Calif., October 17, 2006
http://news.com.com/

Any way you look at it, the solar business is going to be big in 2010, according to equipment manufacturer Applied Materials.

By then, a number of solar-cell manufacturers will be running plants with 10 production lines, and each production line will be capable of squeezing out 100 megawatts worth of solar cells a year, Charlie Gay, vice president and general manager of Applied’s Solar Business Group, said on Tuesday during a luncheon briefing at Solar Power 2006, a conference taking place here this week.

That comes to 1,000 megawatts a year per factory, which is about how much electricity gets produced by a coal or nuclear plant, he said. Build a megasize solar factory, therefore, and you don’t have to build a coal-fired power plant. Put another way, the entire output of solar cells made in 1980 could be produced in a day in one of these plants.

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SAN JOSE, Calif., Oct. 16

Source:
http://webcenters.netscape.compuserve.com/weather/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/3122/20061016/0821277536.htm

SunPower Corporation (SPWR), a Silicon Valley-based manufacturer of the world’s highest efficiency, commercially available solar cells and solar panels, today announced its newest solar panel, offering significantly higher power output and conversion efficiency than its current products. The new SPR-315 solar panel utilizes the company’s newly developed 22-percent-efficient Gen 2 solar cells and carries a rated power output of 315 watts.

“SunPower continues to lead the solar industry with its innovative technology and smart design,” said Peter Aschenbrenner, vice president of marketing and sales. “Our new SPR-315 solar panel breaks the 300 watt power barrier while offering even higher efficiency than SunPower’s previous industry-leading products.

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By Michael Kanellos
http://news.com.com/Sharp+expanding+beyond+silicon+in+solar/2100-1008_3-6126899.html
Story last modified Tue Oct 17, 2006

SAN JOSE, Calif.–Sharp Electronics, one of the largest manufacturers of silicon solar panels, is experimenting with new materials.

At the Solar Power 2006 Conference and Expo here, the company is showing off several prototype solar panels and a new system it hopes will increase efficiency and make it easier to install new solar systems. One prototype solar panel combines a tiny solar cell measuring about a quarter of an inch per side that sits beneath a Fresnel lens (a ridged lens originally used in lighthouses), which radically concentrates sunlight. Further improving its performance, the solar panel rotates with the sun.

Overall, Sharp says the panel can convert 36 percent of the sunlight that strikes it into electricity, far higher than the 13 to 22 percent conversion rates of commercial silicon solar cells.

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