[amor de cosmos]

Life on the Edge – Mathematical Insights Yield Better Solar Cells
Mathematics, Renewable Energy

Last Tuesday I had the pleasure of attending the Third Annual Mitacs Awards ceremony in Ottawa. These awards recognize the outstanding R&D innovation achievements of the interns supported by the various Mitacs programs—Accelerate, Elevate and Globalink. This year, I was particularly inspired by the story of the winner of the undergraduate award category, a Globalink intern from Nanjing University in China named Liang Feng. The Globalink program invites top-ranked undergraduate students from around the world to engage in four month research internships at universities across Canada. Liang Feng spent this summer in the lab of Professor Jacob Krich of the University of Ottawa Physics Department studying Intermediate Band (IB) photovoltaics, a technology that is being used to design the next generation of solar cells.

Modern solar cells are based on silicon and other semiconductor materials and have been around for nearly 60 years. The first practical device, the “solar battery”, was invented in Bell Labs in 1954 and achieved 6% efficiency in converting incident sunlight into electricity. By 1961, it was determined that the “theoretical limit” for solar cell efficiency based on p-n semiconductors is 33.7%. As with many theoretical limits, creative scientists have found ways to break the rules, and the best solar cells today use multilayer structures and exotic materials to achieve more than 44% efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity.

http://mpe2013.org/2013/11/27/life-o...r-solar-cells/