Tuesday, May 3, 2011

ORNL Research Discovers More Efficient Way To Produce Solar Power.

William Pentland writes for Forbes (5/3), the according to research carried out by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, "solar cells designed with 3-D nanocone tips can boost the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaics by a whopping 80%." Pentland says that "the new technology solves significant performance problems resulting from the inefficient migration of electron charges associated with solar photons." Jun Xu, a member of ORNL's Chemical Sciences Division, said of the research, "The important concept behind our invention is that the nanocone shape generates a high electric field in the vicinity of the tip junction, effectively separating, injecting and collecting minority carriers, resulting in a higher efficiency than that of a conventional planar cell made with the same materials."

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