Transparent solar cells are the holy grail. The new discovery allowed a record conversion

Researchers have developed a method to combine several dyes into dye-sensitive cells

Transparent solar cells have great potential in many applications, and although it is difficult to imagine their use in homes and apartments, glazed public buildings and high-rise office buildings will greatly benefit from them. This market segment is constantly evolving, but the idea of ​​transparent solar panels is by no means new, because, for example, dye-stained solar cells (DSC) were developed as early as the 1990s. Since then, the process of improving it has continued and they have added another brick to it Scholars from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

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A team of experts took dye-sensitized solar cells, which are cheap and dye-concentrated, to the point of improving them to the point that they don’t need direct sunlight to generate electricity. He achieved this by discovering a way to create innovative transparent photosensitizers, i.e. molecules that can be activated by light and absorb in the entire visible light spectrum.

Transparent solar cells have limitations

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This is important because earlier versions of these cells were largely dependent on direct sunlight. This problem has been overcome with new photosensitizers that can quantitatively harvest light across the visible spectrum when used together. This was achieved thanks to the development of a production method that consists in the pre-adsorption of a single layer of a hydroxamic acid derivative onto a nanocrystalline porous surface of titanium dioxide. This method produces DSC panels with more than two different dyes that exhibit complementary optical absorption and can absorb light across the entire spectrum.

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The energy conversion efficiency of the cell produced in this way reached record values ​​of 15.2% in typical sunlight, which were recorded after a 500-hour long-term operational stability test. By contrast, the energy conversion efficiency ranged from 28.4 percent to 30.2 percent over a wide range of ambient light intensities. However, nothing is known about further research and development of these cells and their introduction to the market.