News — ITO

Over the last several decades, scientists and engineers at national labs, universities, and private companies continue to explore and develop new types of cells and push the capabilities of existing ones, because an ideal technology is yet to be developed. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) maintains a plot of compiled values of highest confirmed conversion efficiencies for research cells, from 1976 to the present, for a range of photovoltaic technologies. IEEE Spectrum recently partnered with three of the world’s leading independent test labs to create an interactive and updated history of record-breaking photovoltaic (PV) cells. While the full charts are...

In a discovery that could have profound implications for future energy policy, scientists at Columbia University have demonstrated that it is possible to manufacture solar cells that are far more efficient than existing silicon-based cells by using a new kind of material. MSE Supplies is a leading supplier of FTO and ITO glass substrates for solar cells research.  Custom patterns can be fabricated based on customer provided drawings.  The team, led by Xiaoyang Zhu, a professor of chemistry at Columbia University, focused its efforts on a new class of solar cell material known as hybrid organic inorganic perovskites (HOIPs). Their results,...

The best-performing cell, which contains the FTO/Bl-TiO2/mp-TiO2+CH3NH3PbBr3 (~2-nm QDs)/PTAA/Au configuration shows the following results: open-circuit voltage (VOC)=1.110 V, current density (JSC)=14.07 mA cm−2, fill factor=0.73 and an 11.40% PCE.     MSE Supplies is a leading supplier of both standard and custom-made FTO or ITO glass substrates for thin film solar cells research.    NPG Asia Materials (2015) 7, e208; doi:10.1038/am.2015.86Published online 14 August 2015 Highly stable and efficient solid-state solar cells based on methylammonium lead bromide (CH3NH3PbBr3) perovskite quantum dots Sawanta S Mali1, Chang Su Shim1 and Chang Kook Hong1 1Polymer Energy Materials Laboratory, School of Applied Chemical Engineering, Chonnam National University, Gwangju, South Korea Correspondence: Professor Dr CK Hong,...

The world’s highest efficiency solar cells have been developed at the University of New South Wales, which could eventually lead to zero-energy buildings equipped with ultra-thin panels. The cells are made from CZTS, a mixture of copper, zinc, tin, and sulphur; the cells remove the toxicity and scarcity problems of cadmium and selenium mixtures usually used in thin-film panels, because all four materials are both common and non-toxic. “They can be deposited directly onto materials as thin layers that are 50 times thinner than a human hair, so there’s no need to manufacture silicon ‘wafer’ cells and interconnect them separately,” said Professor Martin Green, an expert in...

Large optical nonlinearity of indium tin oxide in its epsilon-near-zero region Authors: M. Zahirul Alam, Israel De Leon, Robert W. BoydScience 28 Apr 2016:DOI: 10.1126/science.aae0330   By Amy Nordrum Posted 28 Apr 2016 There are plenty of reasons why it’s useful to transfer information through photons or use light particles to carry out tasks within a system or device, speed chief among them. But in order to use photons with even greater dexterity in the future, researchers will need to control the way light behaves as it passes through a material. One way to do this is by adjusting the material’s refractive...