Two German and a French research institute have jointly set a new record for converting sunlight into electricity based. They improved the performance of a new type of solar cell that three years ago, was developed.
The solar cells were made by the German Helmholtz Zentrum berlin and the Fraunhofer-institute and the French CEA-Leti developed and manufactured by Soitec. The solar cells consist of four sub-units: photovoltaic cells with four different characteristics. The subunits are sensitive to light of different parts of the spectrum of sunlight, making their joint sensitivity to light, a broad spectrum, from infrared to ultraviolet, covers. The recordrendement of 44.7 percent is an improvement of an earlier record, or 43.6 percent, which the researchers in may this year settled.
The solar cells are deployed in so-called concentrator photovoltaics, in which sunlight is concentrated to many times the normal intensity. For the record, it was sunlight with mirrors and lenses focused to an intensity of the equivalent of 297 ‘suns’: the normalized intensity of the sun is 1000W/m2. The researchers make use of semiconductor material in the III-V-group, in which the four layers or subunits as a single monolithic cell to be produced. The researchers want to term cells produce an efficiency of 50 percent can achieve.
Update 12.10: The intensity of the sunlight on the solar cells be clarified: the normalized energy of sunlight is 1000W/m2: for the experiment, this was almost three hundred times amplified.
