The University of Delaware has inched up the record for solar cell efficiency with a new device that can convert 42.8 percent of the light that strikes it into electricity.
That beats the old record of 40.7 percent hit in December. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been funding research to get efficiency up to 50 percent.
The cell, created by Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett of UD, splits incoming light into three buckets: high energy, low energy, and medium energy light. The light is then directed to different materials, which then extract electrons out of the photons that make up sunlight.
The device also has an optical concentrator, sort of like a lens that directs more sunlight to the solar cell than would occur naturally and thereby increasing efficiency.
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News source: News.com
That beats the old record of 40.7 percent hit in December. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has been funding research to get efficiency up to 50 percent.
The cell, created by Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett of UD, splits incoming light into three buckets: high energy, low energy, and medium energy light. The light is then directed to different materials, which then extract electrons out of the photons that make up sunlight.
The device also has an optical concentrator, sort of like a lens that directs more sunlight to the solar cell than would occur naturally and thereby increasing efficiency.
View: Full Article News source: News.com
These ultra efficient panels are just not available for home use, or a flat out too expensive for them atm, the faster the technology improves and is adopted elsewhere though, the faster they should become generally available.
All methods produce something polution wise.... one of the reasons solar farms don't even use solar panels (they use mirrors instead and focus the light at a point on a tower) is to reduce that kind of polution
You don't extract the electrons out of the photons, it's impossible to do so. Photons are elementary particles like electrons but have zero mass. You use the energy of the photons to extract electrons out of the semiconductors they use. By bombarding the material with photons, you increase the energy level of the electrons and thus make them break out of their bond with the atom.
Journalism at its finest! Lol =)
Pip'
30 days of the year ;-) Shame someone can't come up with a way
of releasing the Hydrogen atoms from good old H20, then we'd
be "cooking on gas!"
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