Scientists effortlessly continue to test and improve on the efficiency of solar cells. This continues urge to push the bar higher was again attained as researchers at the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratories (NREL, Colorado, US) recently reported having achieved a 31.1% solar cell conversion efficiency. They did this using the dual-junction solar photovoltaic (PV) cell technology with the conditions -- one sun of illumination. This is actually a new tested record -- world record -- for solar cell efficiency.This announcement came as a boost to the solar research scientific community during the 39th IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference in Tampa, Florida. NREL's Scientist Myles Steiner gave this announcement breaking the previous record of 30.8% efficiency which was held by Alta Devices. The piece of ground breaking magic is 0.25 square centimeters in size, and is a tandem cell made up of a composition of a gallium indium phosphide cell on top of a gallium arsenide cell.
This instrument was measured under AM1.5 global spectrum at 1,000 watts per square meter, and grown in an inverted position. The same mechanism used when NREL developed their inverted metamorphic multi-junction (IMM) solar cell. This solar cell is then turned during processing, and the front covered with a bilayer anti-reflection coating, and on the back with a highly reflective gold contact layer.
"Historically, scientists have bumped up the performance of multijunction cells by gradually improving the material quality and the internal electrical properties of the junctions -- and by optimizing variables such as the band gaps and the layer thicknesses,"..."The scientific goal of this project is to understand and harness the internal optics," concluded NREL's Scientist Myles Steiner.
Sources: NREL, sciencedaily Image: solar server
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