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Crystal arrangement results in more power from ferroelectric solar cells

pv-magazine.com

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Re: Crystal arrangement results in more power from ferroelectric solar cells

#81

Post by tedsanders »

wiz21c wrote: post #80
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #67

The 1000x efficiency headline is from Figure 4 of the source PDF: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/7/23/eabe42... Units are Amps per miliwatt on the Y axis and electron volts on the X axis. The black BTO line has a minimum of around 1x10^-10 at 2.8 eV, which is the energy of a photon in 450 nm blue light, and the red SBC222 line has a minimum of around 1x10^-7. Yes, the difference between 10^-10 and 1…

I absolutely don't understand all the physics but are "barium titanate" and "strontium titanate" rare stuff ?

No. Depends on your definition of rare, of course. You can see prices for various formulations and purities if you Google. Strontium titanate is used for jewelry, as it was one of the main diamond simulants back before cubic zirconia. I did my PhD working with crystals of strontium titanate and contributed to two Wikipedia articles on it.

Looking at the elemental abundances you can see that titanium and strontium are fairly high, above both gallium and arsenic, another solar cell pair. Barium is in the ballpark of gallium and arsenic.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_el...

Re: Crystal arrangement results in more power from ferroelectric solar cells

#82

Post by rikkipitt »

renrutal wrote: post #17
rikkipitt wrote: post #10

Reminds me of my masters research at university. My work was based on hybrid organic-inorganic solar devices based on boron subphthalocyanine chloride and an optimised optical spacer layer. One day, one variation of the type of cell I was producing was over double the output efficiency of what we usually expected. Was exciting until we realised the solar testing rig had been erroneously set to the equivalent output o…

> set to the equivalent output of two suns... I didn't realize we have achieved a Kardashev Type II civilization already :)

Haha, very good.

In fact, we had some equipment similar to that on this site https://solarlight.com/product_category/products/solar-simul...

Basically a super bright light source with a similar spectral output to our sun. A roughly 1x1cm solar cell in a nitrogen filled chamber is wired up to check the output under the incident light. Very cool production process. I was extremely lucky to have had the opportunity to help with the research.

Re: Crystal arrangement results in more power from ferroelectric solar cells

#83

Post by jacquesm »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #67

The 1000x efficiency headline is from Figure 4 of the source PDF: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/7/23/eabe42... Units are Amps per miliwatt on the Y axis and electron volts on the X axis. The black BTO line has a minimum of around 1x10^-10 at 2.8 eV, which is the energy of a photon in 450 nm blue light, and the red SBC222 line has a minimum of around 1x10^-7. Yes, the difference between 10^-10 and 1…

Any multi junction cells do considerably better than that 22%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-junction_solar_cell

Re: Crystal arrangement results in more power from ferroelectric solar cells

#84

Post by AtlasBarfed »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #67

The 1000x efficiency headline is from Figure 4 of the source PDF: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/7/23/eabe42... Units are Amps per miliwatt on the Y axis and electron volts on the X axis. The black BTO line has a minimum of around 1x10^-10 at 2.8 eV, which is the energy of a photon in 450 nm blue light, and the red SBC222 line has a minimum of around 1x10^-7. Yes, the difference between 10^-10 and 1…

I do see that a ferroelectric perovskite can do 22%. Maybe this could be the outer protective layer for the perovskite cell. Isn't the main perovskit engineering issue the degradation when exposed to the atmosphere?

Ferroelectric seem to do other interesting thing, like harvest from ultraviolet, and exhibit some "bulk effects" that exceed "theoretical" maximums, but obviously none of that has been found to make a usable commercial cell.

I hope PV research is still being aggressively funded. It seems to me that solar cell costs could be dropped another 50-75% under silicon with the right combination of perovskite and other materials.

The future of our climate hinges on it.

Re: Crystal arrangement results in more power from ferroelectric solar cells

#85

Post by Teknoman117 »

jacquesm wrote: post #83
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #67

The 1000x efficiency headline is from Figure 4 of the source PDF: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/7/23/eabe42... Units are Amps per miliwatt on the Y axis and electron volts on the X axis. The black BTO line has a minimum of around 1x10^-10 at 2.8 eV, which is the energy of a photon in 450 nm blue light, and the red SBC222 line has a minimum of around 1x10^-7. Yes, the difference between 10^-10 and 1…

Any multi junction cells do considerably better than that 22%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-junction_solar_cell

I wonder what the difference in energy demands for producing them are.

Re: Crystal arrangement results in more power from ferroelectric solar cells

#86

Post by spockz »

dylan604 wrote: post #65
spockz wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the tone could come exactly from the brevity. Imagine stepping up to a bakery and hearing “what?” instead of “how can I help you today dear gentleperson?”. Which one would you find more snarky?

Even if the bakery employee yelled "What?" at me, I would not hear snark in that. I would probably hear rude, but not snark. I would also be a little less surprised if it was a very busy place and the employee was visibly harried by the commotion. Or if I was just in any store in NYC. There's a difference between terse and to the point vs being rude. It's not the terse response's fault the recipient cannot tell the d…

I always assigned “rude sarcasm” to snark but apparently it is just sarcasm.
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