Black-silicon Cell Efficiency above 130 Percent

Dean Sigler Announcements, Solar Power, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Aalto University in Espoo, Finland has announced a seemingly impossible breakthrough – black-silicon solar cells that exceed 100-percent efficiency.  This breaks the Shockley-Queisser limit, previously thought to be an unbreakable barrier to any solar cell generating more than 33.7-percent efficiency for a single p-n junction photovoltaic cell.  The 1,000 Watts of sunlight falling on a square meter of single-junction solar cells could never produce more than 337 Watts to a battery or other receiving mechanism.  William Shockley, a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics for his co-creation of the transistor and Hans-Joachim Queisser defined this limit at Shockley Semiconductor in 1961. In a traditional solid-state semiconductor such as silicon, a solar cell is made from two doped crystals.  One is an n-type semiconductor, which has extra free electrons, and the other a p-type semiconductor, which is lacking free electrons, referred to as “holes.” When initially placed in contact with each other, some of the electrons in the n-type portion will flow into the p-type to “fill in” the missing …