IEEE: More efficient solar cells ?

[Mike O'Dell]

wow! this one has got BOTH nanogoobers and quantum zits, er, dots!

the distance between a "PhysRevLetters" disproof of non-existence and
a real process that can be manufactured at scale with workable
economics is very large.

so far, producing nano-particle materials has proven quit difficult
to do in its own right at manufacturing scale. it's hard make large
quantities of anything when the requisite raw materials are not
readily available. (as an aside, i predict that the first commercial
use of quantum dots will be in LEDs to provide frequency conversion
with far better efficiency than is obtainable by phosphors - but they
gotta be able to make them by the kilo, not the microgram.)

if you could just engineer the band gap of silicon to match what
you want, that would go a long way toward amping-up the efficiency.

you might look at bandgapengineering.com to see what one group is doing.
it's a long way from production, but the science works and so far,
it doesn't require billets of unobtanium as feed stock.

	-mo

RegFD - Bandgap Engineering in an NEA portfolio company.


On 6/24/10 3:43 PM, andre kesteloot wrote:
> http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/solar/breakthrough-in-capturing-lost-energy-in-solar-cells
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tacos mailing list
> Tacos at amrad.org
> http://www.amrad.org/mailman/listinfo/tacos

-- 
"Of course it's hard!
If it was easy, we'd just buy it from somebody else!"