Researchers from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have set a new energy efficiency record for Kesterite sun cells, a technology with potential to improve PV systems based on silicon.
Unsw Researchers have achieved a world record-energy conversion efficiency of 13.2% for kesteriet (CZTS) solar cells with high band gaps with a laboratory scale cell that was improved with hydrogen.
CZTS, a composition of copper, zinc, tin and sulfur, is a thin film with a high band, flexible material that is suitable that offers a promising alternative to the wider perovskiet as a Tandem Top Cell candidate effectively to produce and is known that it retains its performance for a long period.
The energy -conversion -efficiency, however, is hindered by relatively low energy -conversion -efficiency, largely attributed to defects created during the production in CZTs.
Prof. Xiaojing Hao and its team of Unsw’s school for photovoltaic and renewable energy engineering say that they have contributed to solving this problem due to glowing or heat treatment, the CZTS solar cell in a hydrogen-batting atmosphere.
“In basic conditions, to make CZTs, you take copper, tin, zinc and sulfur and ‘cooks’ them all together at a certain temperature that it turns into a material that you can use as a semiconductor,” said Hao. “The difficult part is to control the defects that are introduced during that process. What we have shown in this work is that the introduction of hydrogen can cause those defects to have less impact, which is known as passivation. Because hydrogen modulates the defects in CZTs, it helps to increase its efficiency in terms of converting sunlight into electricity. “
The UNSW team achieved an 11% CZTS Celefficiency in 2018 But then progress stagnated.
Hao said that she is hopeful that the new breakthrough will speed up the chances of CZTs that achieve 15% efficiency in the following year and expected commercialization by 2030.
“There is still work to find ways to further reduce the defects we find in CZTs, either during manufacturing or through treatments after the fight against manufacturing,” she said. “But we know this is a good material. When we consider the requirements of below, we know that we need something that is much abundant, that is environmentally friendly, that has good opto -electronic properties and can last for a long time, and CZTs fit the bill. “
The UNSW team, including Kaiwen Sun and Jialiang Huang, is also Research into perovskite -that energy -conversion -efficient levels of almost 27% has achieved, but also quickly breaks -as a potential material that could collaborate with silicon in Tandem PV cells.
“The big picture is that we eventually want to make electricity cheaper and greener to generate,” said Hao. “Silicon modules have almost achieved the limit of their theoretical efficiency, so what we are trying to do is answer the question that comes from the PV industry about what the next generation of cells will be made of.”
The fundamental research behind the record -breaking efficiency has now been published in the Natural energy magazine.
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