Silicon-free Solar
Recently I ran across a reference to the Swiss company Flisom which is a 2005 spinoff of ETH Zurich (The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.)
Traditional photovoltaic (PV) cells use monocrystalline silicon wafers to capture photons in sun light to excite electrons which are then directed to a conductor resulting in direct current. These PV cells are the prevalent technology installed in the marketplace today. Another variation on theme is to coat a silicon substrate with some sort of PV chemical mixture which then performs essentially the same process as pure silicon PV cells. The issue with these approaches is cost, manufacturing and material.
The latest research has revolved around nanocrystal, polymer, and photoelectrochemical cells. That’s where Flisom comes in, they seem to have figured out how to use the photoelectrochemical approach on a plastic foil substrate to harvest sunlight and convert it to direct current. The Flisom approach uses the Cu(In,Ga)Se2 compound (commonly called CIGS) sandwiched between a layer of Zinc Oxide (ZnO) on the top and Molybdenum (Mo) on the bottom. See a cross section of the material in the image below:
The efficiency demonstrated right now is 14%, which is pretty good for an emerging technology. If they can perfect this approach, the solar electric power landscape will change as the material can be cost effectively produced and all of the sudden common items like windows can become solar arrays inobtrusively and cheaply. That would be pretty cool…
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Technorati Tags: Energy | Solar | Photoelectrochemical
