Governments all over the world are becoming increasingly concerned with their nation’s carbon footprint and how it can be reduced – and research into and development of alternative energy sources is paramount in this, helping to drive down our reliance on damaging fossil fuels.
The use of perovskites – minerals first discovered in the Urals back in 1839 – is now being looked into by a team of researchers at the UT Dallas Nano-Tech Institute to see how effective they could be in developing alternative solar cell materials.
Speaking to EE News Europe, deputy director of the institute Professor Anvar Zakhidov explained that perovskites have lots of exciting physical properties that aren’t found in other materials and they have “particularly interesting excitons with substantial binding energy and strong interaction with light”.
He went on to note that perovskite is a very promising material with regards to the solar power industry. Its efficiency levels have reached 22.1 per cent already and this continues to rise. It’s also simple to obtain films of organometal halide perovskites from solutions in more typical organic solvents. Other properties like non-linear optical activity and ferroelectricity are also offered by the material’s structure.
Last year, Jao van de Lagemaat of the US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy noted that perovskite does appear to be both low cost and highly efficient as a material, so it could well be one that changes the game where solar energy research is concerned.
One of its main advantages is that it can be created using industrial chemicals and common metals, so removing the need for expensive raw materials.
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