Home
Science
Science News
New Material to Increase Solar Cell Efficiency

New Material to Increase Solar Cell Efficiency

By Indo-Asian News Service | Updated: 20 July 2015 12:48 IST

Click Here to Add Gadgets360 As A Trusted Source

A team of researchers has come up with a solar cell that produces fuel rather than electricity. A material called gallium phosphide enables the solar cell to produce clean fuel hydrogen gas from liquid water.

To connect an existing silicon solar cell to a battery that splits the water may well be an efficient solution; but it is very expensive.

So, researchers were streamlining their search to a semi-conductor material that is able to both convert sunlight into an electrical charge and split water.

The team found gallium phosphide (GaP), a compound of gallium and phosphide, useful in this respect.

GaP has good electrical properties but the drawback is that it cannot easily absorb light when it is a large flat surface as used in GaP solar cells, said the study that appeared in Nature Communications.

The researchers overcame this by making a grid of very small GaP nanowires, measuring five hundred nanometres (a millionth of a millimetre) long and ninety nanometres thick.

"That makes these kinds of cells potentially a great deal cheaper," said lead author Erik Bakkers from Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands.

This immediately boosted the yield of hydrogen by a factor of ten to 2.9 percent.

"In short, for a solar fuel future, we cannot ignore gallium phosphide any longer," Bakkers added.

Comments

For details of the latest launches and news from Samsung, Xiaomi, Realme, OnePlus, Oppo and other companies at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, visit our MWC 2026 hub.

Further reading: GaP, Gallium phosphide, Solar Cell