We all know by now that solar panels offer a huge potential for people to move away from electricity generated from burning coal. But a new innovation in solar panels devised by scientists stands to more than double the amount of light captured by conventional solar cells. Get a load of this!
In a newly released study, a team of scientists from the UK, Portugal, and Brazil have discovered that etching a shallow pattern of grating lines in a checkerboard design on solar cells can enhance the current generated by crystalline silicon by as much as 125%.
“We found a simple trick for boosting the absorption of slim solar cells,” explains photovoltaics researcher Christian Schuster from the University of York.
“Our investigations show that our idea actually rivals the absorption enhancement of more sophisticated designs – while also absorbing more light deep in the plane and less light near the surface structure itself.”
Until now, comparable attempts using simple grating designs had only produced marginal gains in sunlight absorption, the team says.
While every single discovery is its own advancement towards a world less reliant on fossil fuels, Schuster and his team say even very simple tweaks to existing solar cell technology could significantly increase our ability to reap power from the sun.
The researchers focused on identifying what core theoretical considerations would enable an optimised pattern for the scattering and diffraction of sunlight.
Their goal was to make a solar cell absorb more energy by trapping more sunlight while reflecting less away from itself.
What Did They Discover
In an experiment, the team simulated the performance of a checkerboard-patterned and compared it against other kinds of solar cell designs including a plain planar cell, vertical grating lines, crossed lines, and others.
The results suggested the checkerboard with randomized rotations of its repeating units generates more current than any of the competing cells and generates about 125% as much as a conventional solar cell without a grating line design.
In addition, because of its inherent simplicity, the team says the checkerboard design could be easier to manufacture on an industrial scale, and also more robust than other more complex nano-structured solar cell patterns.
By manufacturing thinner solar cells with a checkerboard design, the cost-effectiveness of resources used for cell fabrication could be 10-fold, the team thinks.
“In principle, we would deploy 10 times more solar power with the same amount of absorber material,” Schuster says.
“Ten times thinner solar cells could enable a rapid expansion of photovoltaics, increase solar electricity production, and greatly reduce our carbon footprint.”
This is an amazing breakthrough in the solar world. Anything that drives down cost only helps this indusry grow bigger, faster and obviously cleaner!
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