Solar Panels, new Technologies

Ceramic material for solar panels could make them cheaper, more efficient

A unique solar panel design made with a new ceramic material points the way to potentially providing sustainable power cheaper, more efficiently, and requiring less manufacturing time. It also reaches a four-decade-old goal of discovering a bulk photovoltaic material that can harness energy from visible and infrared light, not just ultraviolet light.

This affordable sun-powered future could be closer than we think thanks to early tests on this new material, which was developed by a team led by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University. The tests were conducted, in part, at the Advanced Photon Source housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory.

The team created a new class of ceramic materials that has three main benefits. First, it can produce a solar panel that is thinner than today's silicon-based market leaders by using one material to do the work of two. Second, it uses cheaper materials than those used in today's high-end thin-film solar panels. Third, the material is ferroelectric, which means it can switch polarity, a key trait for exceeding the theorized energy-efficiency limits of today's solar cell material.

...more here:

http://www.designfax.net/cms/dfx/opens/article-view-dfx.php?nid=4&bid=321&aid=2602&et=featurearticle&pn=03

 

Hi Brian,
Yes , nice to see the progress in this field. It was time we were getting less inexpensive production panels, whereby even by overcast, we will be able to place sufficient energy into our batteries. Can't wait to see them on the market.
Bert