Alternative energy got a big boost from TechEye.net, which reports that a new generation of solar panels could double in efficiency:
A team made of researchers from both UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz has been awarded a $1.5 million development fund by the National Science Foundation to continue work on the development.
While most conventional solar cells use the principle of ‘one photon in, one electron out’, whereby a photon particle of light hits the solar cell and produces one electron as an electrical current, according to Gergely Zimanyi, a professor at UC Davis, the researchers have been working on a method that will allow many electrons to be produced.
The previous theoretical maximum efficiency of this transfer was capped at 31 percent, however by enabling several particles to be generated from a single photon the maximum can be raised to between 42 and 65 percent.
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The UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz team believe that through the use of nanotechnology they will be able to make the idea become a reality, constructing a fully functioning solar cell from germanium and silicon nanoparticles.
The devil, as usual, will be in the details – in this case, putting nanoparticles to work in a medium that can be mass produced.