Making solar energy more viable
Buiding nanoscale devices to help fuel the green revolution
The Biodesign Institute has a number of projects exploring various aspects of solar energy. One of these is an innovative project designed to break through the current technological hurdles of solar energy and make it a more viable energy source.
Today’s solar panels, made up of thousands of individual solar cells, are extremely inefficient and costly to produce, limiting Sunbelt states like Arizona from fully utilizing its most abundant renewable energy resource.
During a period of more than 15 years, ASU has assembled a first-class team of scientists who have been studying various pieces of the photosynthetic apparatus, understanding its chemistry and biochemistry, and learning how to design and build solar energy harvesting components based on this fundamental science.
The Biodesign team’s goal is to create tiny, nanoscale devices for higher efficiency solar energy and photonics applications. This so-called ’bottom up’ approach to nanotechnology promises to take on the challenges of solar energy research by building devices atom by atom at a scale a thousand times finer than the width of a human hair.
In every solar cell, light energy, measured in the billions of photons that hit a square centimeter patch of the cell every second, is converted to electricity. But even the most advanced solar cells can only harness 10 to 30 percent of the available sunlight energy. The majority of the energy is lost, and simply escapes as heat.
The ASU researchers hope to make progress by, in this case, shedding more heat than light.
