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Page added on January 5, 2014
Graphene Heats Up Race For Cheap Organic Solar Cells
Does Robin Thicke’s notorious hit “Blurred Lines” contain secret references to graphene? We don’t know, but we are interrupting our New Year’s Day Walking Dead marathon to bring you news that graphene, the notoriously hard-to-handle nanomaterial of the new millennium, has been domesticated to the point where it could help drive down the cost of solar cells.
Here’s the deal: a team of researchers at the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore has calculated that with today’s graphene production technology, you can manufacture graphene electrodes that could almost match the efficiency of electrodes made from indium tin oxide (ITO) in organic solar cells.
Graphene courtesy of Army Materiel Command.
The Graphene Road To Low Cost Solar Cells
That’s a significant breakthrough because although we’re big fans of ITO for its many applications in next-generation electronic devices (here, here and especially here for example), when used in organic solar cells ITO is relatively brittle. It is also expensive and vulnerable to price spikes on the global market.
The search has been on for cheaper, more durable substitutes that would result in lower up-front costs for organic solar cells, plus the added bonus of a longer lifecycle.
To rewind just a bit, organic refers to a relatively new class of solar cells made from polymers (aka plastic). Though less efficient than conventional solar cells based on silicon, organic solar cells lend themselves to low cost, high volume manufacturing processes. They are also light, flexible, and potentially transparent, which provides the opportunity for a broader range of applications including see-though solar windows.
Graphene comes into all this because, being only one atom thick, it is virtually invisible and it weighs practically nothing, making it a perfect fit for organic solar cells. Despite its svelte form graphene also posses superior strength and unique conductive properties that make it ideal for electronic devices including photovoltaic cells.
Solar Cells And Supply Security
The Singapore breakthrough is also significant because in its natural state graphene is nothing more than a nano-layer of graphite, which is a common form of carbon found in many parts of the world. In other words, once the manufacturing process is refined, graphene could be priced competitively in global markets.
That’s in contrast to indium. Aside from cost issues, the US Department of Energy has targeted indium as a supply risk, so you can bet that our friends over in Singapore aren’t the only ones looking at indium substitutes.
The A*STAR Graphene Breakthrough
Now let’s get back to the A*STAR research. Lead researcher Wee Shing Koh and his team based their calculations on sheets of graphene that were manufactured by an existing process called chemical vapor deposition. Loosely speaking, that process involves blowing a mist doped with nanoparticles of material over a substrate, resulting in a super-thin film.
The trick was to get a graphene sheet to function with about the same electrical resistance of a sheet of ITO, and the problem was that one sheet of graphene has about four times the resistance of ITO.
The solution was a kind of mathematical balancing act. You can bring down the resistance of graphene simply by layering on more sheets, but the downside is that you block more light.
The team started with a baseline organic solar cell and calculated that if you keep the layers of graphene down to four, you can get 92.3 percent of the power delivered by an equivalent ITO electrode.
That sounds decent enough, but the team also found that the four layers could come much closer to ITO’s effectiveness when used in next-generation organic solar cells that absorb a broader range of the light spectrum.
Koh also predicts that with improvements in the manufacturing process, the resistance-per-sheet of graphene could become lower, so that only one or two sheets would be needed to match the performance of ITO.
Stay tuned.
9 Comments on "Graphene Heats Up Race For Cheap Organic Solar Cells"
robertinget on Sun, 5th Jan 2014 10:28 pm
a link to a graphene tracking web site;
http://www.graphenetracker.com/the-original-graphene-patent/
More:
China, US and South Korea hold 68% of all the graphene patents, writes Dr. John Lang, a Senior Lecturer at LCA Business School London.
China holds the most graphene patents with 2,024 or 30%. Next up is the US with 1,754 or 23% and lastly is South Korea with 1,160 or 15%.
Graphene has been described as a new wonder material with applications for batteries, renewables and many other uses. It is composed a single atom thick layer of carbon atoms arranged in a regular hexagonal pattern.
South Korea’s Samsung looks to benefit the most from a large patent portfolio. The company ranked as one of the world’s top ten patent holders, alongside International Business Machines (IBM), Sandisk 3D LLC, Rice University (William Marsh) and Tsinghua University. Samsung’s dominance as a technological powerhouse with a wide range of businesses means that the company will be able to more quickly deploy any advances made by its researchers.
With a myriad of uses, Lang says it is no wonder companies and state-owned enterprises are walling off potential product and market spaces.
Lang says the countries are taking a scatter gun approach to patent filing.
This will give Chinese, U.S., and South Korean firms first mover advantages as product/market spaces open, to fully exploit those opportunities under the protective cloak of the patent system. But it will also allow them to legally defend those products and markets, foreclosing options for competitors, and have a higher degree of early life cycle monopolization over value chains of products and services created in the nascent Graphene ecosystems. And when those nascent ecosystems begin to bring new products to markets, those in at this stage will potentially benefit the most by setting the industry standards, and becoming keystone firms for future roadmaps.
More?
http://www.businessinsider.com/graphene-where-business-and-science-collide-2013-4
full disclosure: Own First Solar because they traded million point five
stock for GE’s thin film technology.
IMO the big money will be made by the final sellers and numerous on site turn-key hybrid utilities.
Makati1 on Sun, 5th Jan 2014 11:32 pm
Ad for a ‘maybe someday’ techie idea.
The word’s “could”, “predicts”, etc means that it will be years, if ever, until it is available on the shelf. It sounds like a nice idea but, my bet is never. We shall see.
GregT on Mon, 6th Jan 2014 1:56 am
We already had ‘cheap organic solar cells’. As a matter of fact, they have always been free. They are called leaves, and unlike money, they really do grow on trees.
Maybe we should be focussing on preserving them, instead of creating more man-made technologies in our attempts to replace them.
We really need to wake up, tech is killing our planet.
Harquebus on Mon, 6th Jan 2014 2:12 am
Yep. “predicts that with improvements in the manufacturing process”
robertinget on Mon, 6th Jan 2014 2:55 am
Graphene water filtration does more efficient desalination with half the energy.
http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2013/10/graphene-filter-targets-water-treatment-carbon-capture
Two independent groups of researchers have demonstrated graphene-based membranes that can separate gas molecules according to their size and shape. One of the membranes separates hydrogen from nitrogen and carbon dioxide,1 while the other membrane separates carbon dioxide from nitrogen,2 and could be used in carbon capture processes to curb greenhouse emissions.
Graphene is an atom thick layer of graphite made up of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons, like atomic-scale chicken wire. Since the material was first produced in 2004 – an achievement recognised by the 2010 Nobel prize for physics – scientists have discovered it has a host of superlative optical, electronic and mechanical properties. Another property which scientists have been interested in, however, is its permeability to gases. If graphene were permeable to different gas molecules, it could be used as a filter and, as it’s one atom thick, it could separate molecules very quickly.
Makati1 on Mon, 6th Jan 2014 8:02 am
Techies are worried that their world is slipping away with the end of abundant energy…
kervennic on Mon, 6th Jan 2014 10:55 am
CVD is done on a high quality substrate. When i was still working in a lab 2 years ago, they were using silicon carbide.
I do not think this is cheap at all. Besides tey would have, I guess, to maintain high quality domain on large area and with four layers. To get an idea about feasability ths is not a computer scietist you have to ask but a real physicits working daily on fabrication.
Just look at all the promise they made with caon nanotbes. There is still no real use of them in micro electronics. They have swallowed huge amount of research budget over years, before graphene took over…
Kenz300 on Mon, 6th Jan 2014 3:38 pm
The price of oil, coal and nuclear keeps rising and causing environmental damage.
The price of wind and solar keeps dropping every year with advances in technology and economies of scale.
Wind and solar power plants use little or no water to generate electricity when compared to coal or nuclear power plants. This fact will become more important as water scarcity becomes more of a problem around the world.
Norm on Tue, 7th Jan 2014 10:14 am
welfare bums on a cushy government bogus research grant. sleeping in until nooon everyday, and pocketing their six figure salary like clockwork. if the graphene is one atom thick, it wont carry very much energy, will it. cheezus, just how many atoms do you think are in a conductive copper foil? Mayyyybe more than one atom thickness? Derrrr, duhhhh, don’t know, I am a _____ (fill in the blank, MBA, American, idiot, entitlement class member, etc etc)
And thems copper atoms. so this is a law of physics violator from square #1. you can’t get significant energy out of a thin layer of graphene. So why are we talking about it.