solar cells tagged posts

A Safer, Greener way to make Solar Cells: Toxic Solvent Replaced

Researcher Carys Worsley at work in the SPECIFIC labs, identifying a safer, greener way to make solar cells
Researcher Carys Worsley at work in the SPECIFIC labs, identifying a safer, greener way to make solar cells 

Scientists at SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre, Swansea University, have found a way to replace the toxic, unsustainable solvents currently needed to make the next generation of solar technology.

Printed carbon perovskite solar cells have been described as a likely front runner to the market because they are extremely efficient at converting light to electricity, cheap and easy to make.

A major barrier to the large-scale manufacture and commercialisation of these cells is the solvents used to control crystallisation of the perovskite during fabrication: this is because they are made from unsustainable materials and are banned in many countries due to their toxicity...

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Battery-free Game Boy Runs Forever

Ultimate goal of battery-free computing is to reduce society’s reliance on batteries, which are costly, environmentally hazardous and end up in landfills. Credit: Northwestern University

Button pressing and solar energy power the retro gaming device. Researchers develop first-ever battery-free, energy-harvesting, interactive device. And it looks and feels like a retro 8-bit Nintendo Game Boy. It’s a powerful proof-of-concept, developed by researchers at Northwestern University and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands, that pushes the boundaries of battery-free intermittent computing into the realm of fun and interaction.

Instead of batteries, which are costly, environmentally hazardous and ultimately end up in landfills, this device harvests energy from...

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Researchers shed light on the Building Blocks for next-generation LED displays

This illustration was featured on the back cover of Nanoscale Advances, an open-access journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Image Credit: College of Science

Three teams of researchers at Clemson University have joined forces to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding perovskite nanocrystals, which are semiconductors with numerous applications, including LEDs, lasers, solar cells and photodetectors.

A research article titled “The correlation between phase transition and photoluminescence properties of CsPbX3 (X=Cl, Br, I) perovskite nanocrystals” recently appeared in Nanoscale Advances, an open-access journal published by the Royal Society of Chemistry...

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Transparent Graphene Electrodes might lead to New Generation of Solar Cells

A new manufacturing process for graphene is based on using an intermediate carrier layer of material after the graphene is laid down through a vapor deposition process. The carrier allows the ultrathin graphene sheet, less than a nanometer (billionth of a meter) thick, to be easily lifted off from a substrate, allowing for rapid roll-to-roll manufacturing. These figures show this process for making graphene sheets, along with a photo of the proof-of-concept device used (b).
Courtesy of the researchers

Engineers have synthesized a tiny structure with high surface area and discovered how its unique architecture drives ions across interfaces to transport energy or information...

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