Hot Solar Cells

Hot Solar Cells

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Current solar cells are bulky, expensive and inefficient. Current silicon solar cells only capture violet to red light of the light spectrum to convert into electricity. This means that only 32% of the sunlight can be converted into electricity.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has now developed a new type of solar device that is capable to capture more of the sun's energy. The trick is to convert the light into heat and then convert the heat back to light, but in the usable spectrum of the solar panels. This MIT device is the fist that can capture more energy than the photo-voltaic cell alone, this means that efficiency can thus be increased to figures never reached before.

The current prototype is operating at 6.8%, which is still lower than the 32% of current solar cell, but with some enhancements, it should be capable to reach double the efficiency at 64%. This is a dramatic improvement.

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The main success of the device is something called an absorber-emitter!! It essentially acts as a funnel that capture all the light, and most of the light is converted into heat. The emitting layers that surround the absorbing layer now emits he light in a narrow band that is usable by the photo-voltaic cells. The light is filtered, and the unusable light is reflected back creating more heat, thus in a way recycling the unusable light!!

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The down side to this technology is the cost and that it currently only works in a vacuum.

Excess heat can be stored to enable this device to also work in the dark for some time - solar cells working in the dark!! - Nice!!

This is new technology, but it seems to be very promising, to supply us with clean, efficient and hopefully cheap solar power.

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If you would like to read more about this amazing technology, please follow the link, as I have only touched on it without going deeper into the technical side of things.

Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it.