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Solar energy is on the verge of becoming very commercially viable. The cost per kilowatt keeps coming down. But two major hurdles remain: capturing more of the light spectrum and capturing the excited electrons. Researchers at the Ohio State University claim to have solved both.
The exciting news coming out of Columbus is that Malcolm Chisholm and his team have been able to capture the entire light spectrum’s energy. Not only that, but they have been able to make a hybrid material that also allows for much great time to gather the excited electrons before they sink back to the electrons from which they came. The result is a hybrid material that promises incredible advantages. The hybrid material is a “conductive plastic with metals including molybdenum and titanium.” Here is what they found out about electron excitation with this hydrid material:
“They saw something very unusual. The molecules didn’t just fluoresce as some solar cell materials do. They phosphoresced as well. Both luminous effects are caused by a material absorbing and emitting energy, but phosphorescence lasts much longer.
To their surprise, the chemists found that the new material was emitting electrons in two different energy states — one called a singlet state, and the other a triplet state. Both energy states are useful for solar cell applications, and the triplet state lasts much longer than the singlet state.
Electrons in the singlet state stayed free for up to 12 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second — not unusual compared to some solar cell materials. But electrons in the triplet state stayed free 7 million times longer — up to 83 microseconds, or millionths of a second.
When they deposited the molecules in a thin film, similar to how they might be arranged in an actual solar cell, the triplet states lasted even longer: 200 microseconds.”
That’s an incredible gain - one that will allow amazing advances in the energy potential of future solar cells.
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