In a pair of studies, Joshua Pearce, an associate professor of materials science and engineering, has devised a solution in the form of a better PVT made with a different kind of silicon. His research collaborators are Kunal Girotra from ThinSilicon in California and Michael Pathak and Stephen Harrison from Queens University, Canada.
Most solar panels are made with crystalline silicon, but you can also make solar cells out of amorphous silicon, commonly known as thin-film silicon. They dont create as much electricity, but they are lighter, flexible, and cheaper. And, because they require much less silicon, they have a greener footprint. Unfortunately,thin-film silicon solar cells are vulnerable to some bad-news physics in the form of the Staebler-Wronski effect.
That means that their efficiency drops when you expose them to light pretty much the worst possible effect for a solar cell, Pearce explains,which is one of the reasons thin-film solar panels make up only a small fraction of the market.
However, Pearce and his team found a way to engineer around the Staebler-Wronski effect by incorporating thin-film silicon in a new type of PVT. You dont have to cool down thin-film silicon to make it work. In fact,Pearces group discovered that by heating it to solar-thermal operating temperatures,near the boiling point of water, they could make thicker cells that largely overcame the Staebler-Wronski effect. When they applied the thin-film silicon directly to a solar thermal energy collector, they also found that by baking the cell once a day,they boosted the solar cells electrical efficiency by over 10 percent.
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