Live
- World Quality Day: Hindustan Zinc Reaffirms Commitment to Superior Product Quality & Innovation
- Samsung TV Plus Announces the Launch of Four New FAST Channels From Viacom18 Exclusively on Samsung Smart TVs
- Arun Pandey 3.0 set to revolutionise lottery industry with Great Goa Games (GGG)
- How Organisations Can Support Mobile Workforces with Diabetes - From Prevention to Management
- Google Rolls Out Real-Time Spam Detection Feature for Pixel Users
- Marriott international and Samhi hotels announce strategic expansion, sign agreement to open three more properties in india
- Telangana Group-4 Results Declared: 8,084 Candidates Selected for 8,180 Posts
- 2024 Is Shaping Up to Be the Smallest Black Friday Ever: GoDaddy Study
- LG LAUNCHES NEW XBOOM SERIES, WITH POWERFUL SOUND WITH PORTABILITY AND STYLE
- KLH Bachupally's AI and ML Expo Hosts a Fusion of Student Innovation and Industry Expertise
Soon, solar cell that produces fuel rather than electricity
Highlights
A team of researchers has taken an important step towards a solar cell that generates hydrogen.Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology and FOM Foundation presented a very promising prototype of solar cell that produces fuel rather than electricity.
A team of researchers has taken an important step towards a solar cell that generates hydrogen.Researchers at Eindhoven University of Technology and FOM Foundation presented a very promising prototype of solar cell that produces fuel rather than electricity.
The material gallium phosphide enables their solar cell to produce the clean fuel hydrogen gas from liquid water. Processing the gallium phosphide in the form of very small nanowires is novel and helps to boost the yield by a factor of ten and does so using ten thousand times less precious material.
The electricity produced by a solar cell can be used to set off chemical reactions. If this generates a fuel, then one speaks of solar fuels, a hugely promising replacement for polluting fuels. One of the possibilities is to split liquid water using the electricity that is generated (electrolysis).
Among oxygen, this produces hydrogen gas that can be used as a clean fuel in the chemical industry or combusted in fuel cells, in cars for example, to drive engines.
Researchers at TU/e and FOM see their dream candidate in gallium phosphide (GaP), a compound of gallium and phosphide that also serves as the basis for specific colored leds.
GaP has good electrical properties but the drawback that it cannot easily absorb light when it is a large flat surface as used in GaP solar cells. The researchers have overcome this problem by making a grid of very small GaP nanowires, measuring five hundred nanometers (a millionth of a millimeter) long and ninety nanometers thick.
This immediately boosted the yield of hydrogen by a factor of ten to 2.9 percent. A record for GaP cells, even though this is still some way off the fifteen percent achieved by silicon cells coupled to a battery.
As per Erik Bakkers, for the nanowires they needed ten thousand less precious GaP materials than in cells with a flat surface. That makes these kinds of cells potentially a great deal cheaper.
The study appears in the journal Nature Communications.
Next Story
ADVERTISEMENT
