10/14/2018 / By Frances Bloomfield
Solar power may be one of the cleanest forms of energy, but affordable and efficient it is not. According to SolarPowerAuthority.com, a five-kilowat solar panel system can set you back at least $25,000, while an $18,000 system can have a payback period of approximately 20 years. Fortunately, some people are working to change that, and Thomas Hamann is one of those people. The associate professor at the Michigan State University‘s department of chemistry is working on a new paradigm that will bring solar technology one step forward.
Hamann and his team are focusing their efforts on dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC), a thin-film photovoltaic cell that is easy and cheap to manufacture. Though affordable when compared to other thin-film solar cells, dye-sensitized solar cells are notorious for their rather mediocre conversion efficiency.
“The best dye-sensitized solar cells achieve more than 10 percent solar-to-electricity power conversion efficiency,” Hamann explained to MSUToday.MSU.edu. “They fall short of their 20-percent potential level largely because of energy lost in each electron-transfer step.”
To remedy this, Hamann and his team looked to one of the core components of dye-sensitized solar cells: redox shuttles. “All redox shuttles investigated to date have been generally constrained to a small potential window in order to minimize the driving force of dye regeneration with optimized, existing dyes,” stated Hamann. “This energy constraint limits the ability to fully understand and optimize the kinetics.”
Hamann’s team improved the efficiency of redox shuttles by developing new redox shuttles that were based on cobalt. Changing the ligands — or molecules that bind to larger molecules — allowed them to control the rate of electron by a considerable margin, effectively boosting the efficiency of dye-sensitized. solar cells as well. (Related: Solar power could get even more affordable as scientists discover way to replace platinum components with 3D graphene.)
Additionally, redox shuttles are the part of the solar cell that move electrons, and the part that has received considerably less attention that the light-absorbing semiconductor. Through their efforts, however, they hope to encourage more research into redox shuttles, and subsequently, make further improvements to solar cells as a whole.
Hamann elaborated, stating: “Solving the conundrum of finding renewable energy has always been a goal of my research. I enjoy attempting to solve important problems, and I believe we can find sustainable approaches, build new transmission lines and develop new storage batteries to solve these issues.”
See SolarPanels.news more stories on scientific developments and breakthroughs.
Sources include:
Tagged Under: breakthrough, discoveries, dye-sensitized solar cells, energy, energy sources, environment, future tech, renewable energy, research, science breakthroughs, solar power