Flashy Recyclable Photovoltaic System Breaks Record for Solar Energy

If you want your home to stand out, a flashy new photovoltaic module might be just
what youre looking for. The leaf-shaped prototype uses color and shape to redirect
light to two silicon solar cells.

Researchers announced last month at the annual Photovoltaic Science and

Engineering conference in Singapore that their 0.11-square-meter photovoltaic
modules had achieved a record high for efficiency in converting the suns rays to
electricity: 5.8 percent.

[This technology could] become more attractive to architects and people involved in
the building sector, says Angle Reinders, an industrial design engineer at
University of Twente in the Netherlands.

With traditional silicon solar cells on roofs, costs can add up quickly. With that in
mind, many researchers, with an eye toward commercial viability, have tried using
materials that can concentrate light into one or two solar cells.
Typically, engineers place solar cells on the edges of panels and guide the light using
novel materials such as quantum dots and organic dyes. For example, in
research published in 2008, one group achieved 7.1 percent efficiency with four
expensive gallium arsenide solar cells on the edges of a tiny luminescent solar
concentrator with colored dyes. Earlier this year, a Journal of Renewable and
Sustainable Energy article described research using silicon solar cells on the back of
PMMA (acrylic glass) panels; those modules achieved only 3.8 percent efficiency.

Reinders favors the use of plastic because chemical processes exist to remove the
PMMA and recover the electronics, so the photovoltaic modules are recyclable. In
glass sheet photovoltaics, the solar cells and wires in between them end up as waste.
But in order to improve the performance of medium-size solar concentrators using
plastic, Reinders and her colleagues came up with new designs aided by computer
simulations of different shape combinations, colors, numbers of silicon solar cells,
and solar cell positioning.

Heres how the designs work. When sunlight strikes a flat PMMA film mixed with a
particular colored dye, the light reflects inside the film. Depending on the dyes color,
it adjusts the wavelength of the light so that its closer to the infrared range. This is
advantageous because the two silicon solar cells at the bottom of the panel absorb
more light in the infrared range.

The researchers tried to strike a balance between the photovoltaic modules size and
accessibility of light.

The team built a prototypewhich has continued to convert photons to electrons

with 5.8 percent efficiency for the past 1.5 yearsby cutting each of the two solar
cells into three pieces and attaching them to the bottom of films featuring a red dye.
In simulations, the geometry of a rhombic shape appeared to harvest more light rays
than a rectangular shape.

Sue Carter, a physicist at the University of California Santa Cruz who was not
involved in the study but has designed solar concentrators for greenhouses, points
out several potential issues with the design.

First, she says the company she consults for, Soliculture, ships solar concentrator
systems for greenhouses that can achieve up to 7 percent efficiency with reflective
backgrounds. The work, says Carter, is unpublished because she is focusing on
commercialization. Referring to the Dutch research, she said its misleading to list
efficiency in the whole system, because efficiency can always be improved by adding
additional silicon photovoltaic cells.

People can make their own conclusions by going to the website, Carter says.

She added that although photovoltaic cells function better on acrylic, it can become
more expensive than glass and be more difficult to certify. Also, it is challenging to
prove 20-plus-year lifetimes on the organic plastic luminescent materials; it took her
team a lot of work to find a combination of techniques that made it possible, she
writes in an email.

Carter says the size of a photovoltaic system wouldnt have a noticeable effect on
its overall efficiency, but Reinders says the main difference between her labs work
and Carters work is that, because the new prototype uses smaller modules, its easier
for photons to become concentrated because they arent as widely distributed across
the surface. Also, there are differences in dye concentrations and in where the cells
are positioned on the back of the PMMA film.

Reinders agrees that plastics are not as durable as glassshe says pieces of glass
from Roman times are still found at archaeological sitesbut shes confident that
they will stand the test of time. She says its not reasonable to expect that a plastic
sheet would last 25 years. But its possible to make plastic headlights that can resist
degradation for a period of 15 years, so a five to 10 year lifetime would certainly be
reasonable as research progresses.

Reinders says shes found that the plastics are about half the cost of glassmainly
because they are thinner. But the cost will ultimately depend on how the materials
are processed, which requires further investigation. Usually plastics manufacturing is
a lot faster than the glass production process.

As far as certification goes, Reinders points out that requirements in the United
States could be different than those in the Netherlands. And as such, it might be
difficult to meet all certification requirements with plastic. She doesnt see any
problems with electrical performance, but it is easier to scratch plastic than it is to
scratch glass. This, however, could possibly be remedied by using some sort of
coating.

Sayantani Ghosh, a physicist at the University of California, Merced, who was also
not involved in the research, writes in an email that once certain issues are
addressed, this could potentially prove a novel way of capturing solar power in
houses, with significantly lower costs than covering a roof with silicon photovoltaic
cells.

According to Ghosh, the questions that still have to be answered include whether the
materials would be stable under weather conditions such as snow and rain, and how
their thinness could affect their robustness. Theres also the issue of putting the cells
underneath the solar concentrator tile instead of on its edge, which allows a
significant portion of the reemitted light to escape because there isnt a solar cell to
capture it. Also at issue is whether other light harvesting materials could have a
broader light absorption spectrum. Finally, she isnt sure whether a proposed idea of
mixing dyes would work in practice because the emission range of one would overlap
with the absorption of another.

Reinders writes in an email that she has not tested the prototype in harsh weather
conditions yet, but it may be more suitable for climates with a diffuse
irradiance than the glass sheet-based photovoltaic modules. She writes that diffuse
irradiance usually goes hand in hand with climates with lots of clouds and rain.

Reinders also admitted more work needs to be done on ensuring that it can handle
the heat on rooftops. We still can do a lot of research in this field, she says.