The Hindu Business Line : Dye increases efficiency of solar devices

NEW YORK: A simple sheet of glass coated with dye could be enough to cut the costs of solar power by boosting efficiency of solar powered devices. This has been claimed by researchers who have developed a 'solar concentrator' that harvests photons and fu nnels them into photovoltaic devices, allowing relatively small solar cells to harness rays from a much larger area.

Mirrors that track the sun are already used to deliver extra light onto solar panels and maximize their electricity output. But these mirrors can be costly to deploy and maintain, and the solar cell is prone to overheating. Researchers led by Marc Baldo at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, have now come up with an alternative that uses a mixture of dye molecules in a thin film coated onto glass, a report in Nature magazine said. Each dye absorbs light of a different wavelength to make the most of sunlight's spectrum.

By fine-tuning the dye mixture and adding an extra compound to control the re-emission process, ensuring that most of the photons get trapped inside the glass, the team thinks they can boost the power efficiency of a cadmium telluride cell from 9.6 per c ent to 11.9 per cent, and a CIGS cell (copper-indium-gallium-selenide materials) from 13.1 per cent to 14.5 per cent. The research is published this week in journal Science. Researcher Baldo believes that efficiency can be further vastly improved to dou ble the efficiency of currently used solar cells. “We could ultimately double the efficiency of 90 per cent of the solar cells used today,'' he predicts, adding that the system will be easy to commercialize. - PTI

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