Increase Solar Cell Efficiency With a Little Tweak Here and There

Professor Vladimir Mitin or Electrical Engineering and students in his Bonner Hall lab (Photographer: Douglas Levere / © 2012 University at Buffalo)

Fine tuning the minutest parts of a solar cell could double its efficiency says Vladimir Mitin, professor of electrical engineering at the University at Buffalo. According to the professor, the amount of sunlight that a solar cell converts into electricity could be doubled by embedding charged quantum dots into photovoltaic cells and increasing the lifespan of the photoelectrons.

A joint study by scientists from the University at Buffalo (UB) and researchers from Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory have discovered a nanomaterial-based technology that could push the efficiency of solar cell by nearly 45%.

The technology which was developed 10 years ago met with limited success until now when the joint efforts of the UB team and US military saw an advancement in the technology. They overcame their difficulties by making the embedded quantum dots inside the photovoltaic cells to have a sufficient built in charge using selective doping.

This built in charge repels the electrons, who otherwise through a recombination channel with the quantum dots, would have avoided contribution to electricity production.

The team comprising of Mitin, Andrei Sergeev and Nizami Vagidov from UB and Kitt Reinhardt of Air Force Office, nanofabrication expert Kimberly Sablon of US Army Research Lab have applied for provisional patent to protect their technology.