Solar’s technological advantages

Global warming is providing an incentive for inventors to experiment more with solar technologies. By converting heat to focused beams of light, a solar device could create inexpensive and continuous power. Solar panels can be seen on a growing number of rooftops, but even decades after they were first developed, the slabs of silicon remain bulky, expensive, and inefficient. Fundamental limitations stop these conventional photovoltaics from absorbing more than a fraction of the energy in sunlight.

Researchers hard at work on the latest solar technology

Fortunately, a team of MIT scientists has built a different sort of solar device that uses inventive engineering and advances in materials to capture far more of the sun’s energy. The trick is to transmute sunlight into heat and then convert it back into the light but now focused within the spectrum that solar cells can use. The MIT device is the first one to absorb more energy than its photovoltaic cell alone, demonstrating that the method could significantly increase efficiency.
Standard silicon solar cells principally capture the visual light from violet to red. That and other factors mean that they can never turn more than about 32 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity. The MIT device is still a crude prototype, operating at just 6.8 percent efficiency—but with various enhancements, it could be almost twice as efficient as conventional photovoltaics.

New solar technology explored

The key step in creating the device was the development of something called an absorber-emitter. It essentially acts as a light funnel above the solar cells. The absorbing layer is built from solid black carbon nanotubes that capture all the energy in sunlight and convert most of it into heat. As temperatures reach around 1,000 °C, the adjacent emitting layer radiates that energy back out as light, now mostly narrowed to bands that the photovoltaic cells can absorb. The emitter is made from a photonic crystal, a structure that can be designed at the nanoscale to control which wavelengths of light flow through it. Another important advance was the addition of a specialized optical filter that sends the tailored light while reflecting nearly all the unusable photons back.

Do your part by installing solar or your home or business!

Solar power is here to stay, and the sooner you explore how much you can save, the sooner you can enjoy the benefits of residential solar power. Go to HahaSmart.com and try our price checker tool. It tells you how much solar power you need, and how much you can save.

Please visit our solar blog to find out more about the benefits of going solar.