A group of scientists have developed a polymer-based solar cell and indicated that such cells can be produced with efficiencies feasible enough for commercial production.
Referring to the ability of this cell, it has been highlighted that almost every single photon it absorbs is converted into a pair of electric-charge carriers, and every one of those pairs is collected at the cell’s electrodes. The overall efficiency of the cell is 6%, meaning a total of 6% of the absorbed energy is converted into usable electricity when illuminated in the lab with similated solar light. This may seem low, but polymer solar cells to date have not yielded efficiencies better than 5%, reported physorg.com.
“These characteristics make our polymer solar cell the best of its kind produced so far,” said the study's corresponding scientist, Alan Heeger of the University of California at Santa Barbara and the Heeger Center for Advanced Materials at the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology, in South Korea.
Heeger collaborated with colleagues from UC Santa Barbara, the Heeger Center, and the University of Laval in Quebec, Canada.
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