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| Un impianto fotovoltaico a celle solari come lo conosciamo oggi |
Due ricercatori del Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) hanno creato una tecnologia che potrebbe portare, il fotovoltaico, fuori dall' era dei semiconduttori, migliorandone l'efficienza energetica ed abbassandone i costi di produzione.Il futuro è dietro l'angolo.
A technology that would enable low-cost, high efficiency solar cells to be made from virtually any semiconductor material has been developed by researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California (UC) Berkeley. This technology allows for plentiful, relatively inexpensive semiconductors, such as metal oxides, sulfides and phosphides that had previously been considered unsuitable for solar cells because of the difficulty in tailoring their properties by chemical means.
“It’s time we put bad materials to good use,” says physicist Alex Zettl, who led the research along with colleague Feng Wang. “Our technology allows us to sidestep the difficulty in chemically tailoring many earth abundant, non-toxic semiconductors and instead tailor these materials simply by applying an electric field.”
Zettl, who holds joint appointments with Berkeley Labs’ Materials Sciences Division and UC Berkeley’s Physics Department where he directs the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS), is the corresponding author of a paper describing this work in the journal Nano Letters. The paper is titled “Screening-Engineered Field-Effect Solar Cells.” Co-authoring it were William Regan, Steven Byrnes, Will Gannett, Onur Ergen, Oscar Vazquez-Mena and Feng Wang.
