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This is big news for the future of solar energy.
Meet Solar Hopper, an autonomous drone that uses 24 perovskite solar cells to recharge. It also looks mighty cool!
One process designed to improve the efficiency of these panels actually ends up degrading them over time.
This could mean less pollution and cheaper energy for us all
Sick of plastic waste? So are these researchers.
Oh great, more competition for my morning coffee.
Despite solar cells made with perovskite recently crossed the 20 percent efficiency mark, researchers say there's still room to improve if only they knew how charge flows at the nanometer scale. They just had to ask.
A team at Stanford and MIT has devised a novel configuration that combines silicon - the leading solar cell semiconductor - and perovskite - a cheap mineral, only recently exploited for converting solar energy - to form two different layers of sunlight-absorbing material in order to harness energy across a wider spectrum. While performance at this stage is not impressive (it's equally as good or bad as conventional single-layer silicon cells), researchers believe they have methods at their disposal that could double efficiency. If that were to happen, than these could be the cheap, but efficient solar cells we've all been waiting for.
Researchers at Brown University have found a cheaper and easier way to create hybrid perovskites, enabling engineers to develop more affordable and efficient solar cells. Perovskite is a calcium titanium oxide mineral composed of calcium titanate (CaTiO3). The mineral has received much attention in recent years as artificial perovskite crystals have increasingly been used in solar cells. Perovskite films in solar cells are excellent light absorbers, but they until now, they were more expensive to fabric and only created small crystals.
Lead-acid car batteries used to be the norm, but luckily we’re seeing a massive shift towards more efficient and environmentally friendly alternatives like lithium-ion. Still, there are fleets of hundreds of millions of cars that still employ these archaic and toxic batteries. Typically, manufacturers try to have car owners bring their old lead-acid batteries, which […]
We’ve covered quite a bit the recent developments involving perovskite as an extremely promising light-to-energy conversion semiconductor. Now, researchers at University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität are performing research on perovskite-based devices that work the other way around by emitting light. Their research has turned out promising results that suggest high-brightness LEDs, manufactured at […]
Researchers at University of Sheffield demonstrate a perovskite spray-on solar cell for the first time. Also, this is the first time rated efficiency for a spray-on solar cell tops two figures in efficiency, marking an important milestone and breakthrough in the field.
A crystal known to science for more than a century has only in recent years become recognized for its use in harvesting solar power. Since the first successful usage of perovskite in solar cells in 2009, the advances in the field have grown exponentially over time, making it a potential candidate for revamping the solar […]
What’s the most common mineral on Earth? Is it quartz, limestone? Maybe olivine? Well, if you take into consideration the entire planet, the most common mineral would be something known as silicate-perovskite – but now, that mineral finally has a name. On June 2, bridgmanite was approved as the formal name for silicate-perovskite – possibly of the Earth’s […]
Scientists have made great efforts to discover a material that can be used to both absorb and emit light. A fluke may have suffice, since researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore discovered by accident a material that can be used to work as a solar panel, harnessing energy from the sun during the […]
Xenon is a noble gas, the second heaviest of the chemically inert noble gases. The only problem with is that… it’s gone missing! Xenon is almost entirely missing from our atmosphere, somethign which researchers were unable to answer – until now, that is. German researchers believe they managed to find out where the gas is […]
