Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists at the University of Sydney have, for the first time, used a quantum computer to engineer and directly observe a process critical in chemical reactions by slowing it down by a factor of 100 billion times.

Joint lead researcher and Ph.D. student, Vanessa Olaya Agudelo, said, It is by understanding these basic processes inside and between molecules that we can open up a new world of possibilities in materials science, drug design, or solar energy harvesting.

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Transparent solar windows are not only generating news as demonstration projects—many have already been set up. On the list of installations for UE Power are its own offices in Redwood City, California, at the R&D facility of its partner in Northwood, Ohio, a commercial office building in Boulder, Colorado, and in Tokyo, Japan. In addition, it has an installation at Michigan State University. UbiQD also claims to have installations in multiple U.S. states, which include a Holiday Inn hotel, its own headquarters in Los Alamos, and the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado.

What’s the premium for transparency?

UbiQD’s product isn’t commercially available yet, but McDaniel expects the premium for transparent solar power to be not more than 30 percent over ordinary windows. He said that “Traditional solar cells are not sold at a cost per watt, not based on area, like windows. The additional window cost, per watt, is similar to utility-scale solar. We have a similar payback time to traditional solar [before incentives].”

Earlier this year, two-layer solar cells broke records with 33 percent efficiency. The cells are made of a combination of silicon and a material called a perovskite. However, these tandem solar cells are still far from the theoretical limit of around 45 percent efficiency, and they degrade quickly under sun exposure, making their usefulness limited.

The process of improving tandem solar cells involves the search for the perfect materials to layer on top of each other, with each capturing some of the sunlight the other is missing. One potential material for this is perovskites, which are defined by their peculiar rhombus-in-a-cube crystal structure. This structure can be adopted by many chemicals in a variety of proportions. To make a good candidate for tandem solar cells, the combination of chemicals needs to have the right bandgap—the property responsible for absorbing the right part of the sun’s spectrum—be stable at normal temperatures, and, most challengingly, not degrade under illumination.

The number of possible perovskite materials is vast, and predicting the properties that a given chemical composition will have is very difficult. Trying all the possibilities out in the lab is prohibitively costly and time-consuming. To accelerate the search for the ideal perovskite, researchers at North Carolina State University decided to enlist the help of robots.

People living in dry but foggy areas can benefit from this technology.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a system that captures fog in the atmosphere and simultaneously removes contaminants while running using solar power.

The harvesting and water treatment system consists of a metal wire mesh with a solar-light-activated reactive coating that captures the fog. The droplets of water then trickle down into a container below. The mesh is coated with a mixture of specially selected polymers and titanium dioxide, which acts as a chemical catalyst and breaks down the molecules of the pollutants into harmless particles.

Low-cost, widely available materials cool solar panels without using energy to boost electricity output and produce liters of water at the same time.

Creating novel materials by combining layers with unique, beneficial properties seems like a fairly intuitive process—stack up the materials and stack up the benefits. This isn’t always the case, however. Not every material will allow energy to travel through it the same way, making the benefits of one material come at the cost of another.

Using cutting-edge tools, scientists at the Center for Functional Nanomaterials (CFN), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) User Facility at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Institute of Experimental Physics at the University of Warsaw have created a new layered structure with 2D materials that exhibits a unique transfer of energy and charge. Understanding its material properties may lead to advancements in technologies such as solar cells and other optoelectronic devices. The results were published in the journal Nano Letters.

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) are a class of materials structured like sandwiches with atomically thin layers. The meat of a TMD is a transition metal, which can form chemical bonds with electrons on their outermost orbit or shell, like most elements, as well as the next shell. That metal is sandwiched between two layers of chalcogens, a category of elements that contains oxygen, sulfur, and selenium.

Recycling options and technology are slowly emerging as millions of tons of solar panels reach their end of life, threatening to fill landfills.

This is according to a press release by the institution published on Tuesday.

The PV-leaf

Called PV-leaf, the innovation “uses low-cost materials and could inspire the next generation of renewable energy technologies.”

Chromium compounds could soon replace the rare and expensive metals osmium and ruthenium.

Scientists have found a way to make solar panels and phone screens from readily available chromium. This is according to a report.

The article highlights how a major breakthrough sees material “almost as rare as gold” replaced by everyday components, significantly reducing “the price of manufacturing the technology that relies on it.”

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