World’s smallest electric generator may herald breakthrough in solar cell technology

Opening up a new door in solar cell technology, an international team of scientists including a young Indian researcher has developed the world’s smallest electric generator that can convert sunlight into electricity but with an efficiency twice that of conventional solar cells.

At the core of the technology lies a novel nano-material that does three things: it converts sunlight into electricity, it also converts the heat generated by the sunlight into electricity and it can store the electricity within the molecule.

“Normal solar panels have 20 per cent efficiency in converting sunlight into electricity. Our material can do it with 40 per cent efficiency,” Pritam Sadhukhan, an Indian researcher working at Kyushu University in Japan and first author of the study detailing the research told DH.

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Sadhukhan and his co-workers from Kyushu and Tokyo Universities in Japan, Stanford University in the USA and the University of Manchester in the UK have come up with a novel nano-crystal that exhibits photo-energy conversion and energy storage upon light irradiation. The crystal is made out of Cobalt and Gallium metals

Laboratory research has shown that the electricity production capacity of this molecule-based electric generator is significantly higher than commercially available silicon solar cells. Unlike conventional solar cells that can only convert sunlight into electricity, the Cobalt-Gallium crystal can efficiently convert both solar thermal energy and photovoltaic energy into usable electricity.

Moreover, it has the ability to store that electricity for future use within its tiny molecular crystals, which is the size of a sugar cube.

The breakthrough - reported in a recent issue of Nature Communications - came after four years of extensive laboratory work.

While scientists from Stanford University's synchrotron radiation light source were the first to observe and study such a powerful molecular-level energy conversion process, other members in the team took the outcome forward to design and characterise the molecule.

Sadhukhan said multiple industries in Japan and the USA were working to convert the technology into a commercial product as the demand for more-efficient solar cells were on a rise. But there are a few technical challenges that the team needs to overcome.

“Further research is underway to explore more exotic and application oriented new properties in the arena of modern material science,” the scientists reported in the journal.

The project has received financial support from the US Department of Energy and the Royal Society of Chemistry in Britain, with a combined funding of over one million dollars.