AMERICAN researchers have created a new material that overcomes two of the major obstacles to solar power: it absorbs all the energy contained in sunlight and generates electrons in a way that makes them easier to capture.
A team at Ohio State University combined electrically conductive plastic with metals, including molybdenum and titanium, to create the hybrid material.
“There are other such hybrids out there, but the advantage of our material is that we can cover the entire range of the solar spectrum,” said Professor Malcolm Chisholm, who has played a leading role in the work.
Sunlight contains the entire spectrum of colours that can be seen with the naked eye – in other words, all the colours of the rainbow.
What the human eye interprets as colour are really different energy levels, or frequencies, of light.
But, until now, solar-cell materials could capture only a small range of frequencies – and hence only a small fraction of the energy contained in sunlight.
This new material is the first that can absorb all the energy contained in visible light at once.
The material generates electricity just like other solar-cell materials do: light energises the atoms of the material and some of the electrons in those atoms are knocked loose. In time, this new material could play a major role in creating high-efficiency, more cost-effective solar panels for use in industry and the home.