Diesel-Killing Low Cost Solar Cells Fueled By Top Dragster Fuel The next crop of organic solar cells could be lighter, cheaper, more durable and more efficient thanks to the powerful fuel nitromethane. A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has discovered that a quick bath in nitromethane provides organic solar cells with increased electrical conductivity and improved stability, too. Also behind the new breakthrough is funding from the US Navy’s Office of Naval Research, which has been vying with the US Air Force for the title of top in the solar research field. Saving costs on the fabrication end is just part of the achievement. According to Canek Fuentes-Hernandez, a senior researcher on the GIT team, the simplified device enables the use of low-cost conductive materials, too. The research team is especially excited about the potential for producing their low-cost solar cells at commercial scale in parts of the world that don’t have the kind of mature manufacturing infrastructure required for vacuum-based processing. If you’d like to check out the full study, you can find it at the journal Nature Materials (http://ift.tt/2h0MI7a) under the title, “Solution-based electrical doping of semiconducting polymer films over a limited depth.“ The multi-national effort included researchers from the University of California – Santa Barbara, Japan’s Kyushu University, and the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. What is means is that solar cells are just getting cheaper and cheaper as investment is driving better research, and consumer demand is also driving costs down due to volumes being moved. A similar thing is happening with wind technology. And both these technologies (as well as others) also mean generating power closer and closer to where it is consumed. See http://ift.tt/2g7DFg3
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