A team of academics based at the University of Washington have announced an exciting breakthrough in dye-sensitized solar cell technology.

Researchers studying solar cell configurations discovered that by using a design based on a popcorn ball (tiny spheres grouped into bigger porous spheres), efficiency in cheap solar cells was more than doubled.

The advances were detailed in a paper presented at a national meeting of the American Chemical Society in New Orleans. According to lead author Guozhong Cao, a UW professor of materials science and engineering, “we think this can lead to a significant breakthrough in dye-sensitized solar cells.”

Each gram of the new material contains 1,000 square feet of light-absorbing pigment. The complex design also means that light gets trapped inside the materials, leading to a remarkable increase in absorption.

So far, they've only done this with zinc-oxide dyes, which are much less efficient than titanium oxide dyes. The next step in the process is to see if they can reproduce the technique with high-efficiency dyes and still get that 250% spike in efficiency.

Dye-sensitive cells have been around since the early '90s and have so far peaked at about 11% efficiency. But if this new technique works with the more-efficient titanium oxide pigments as it does with the less-efficient zinc oxide, then we could see more than 25% efficiency.

That would make these cells considerably more efficient than current thin-film cells, like ones being produced by Nanosolar. Though dye cells have many of the same advantages as thin-film solar, being lightweight, flexible, and possibly printable, so far thin-film has beat them in cost per watt.

But that was before nano popcorn balls came along. Now we'll just have to wait and see.

Source: Dailytech.com