(July 19, 2015) Researchers
at Kaunas University of Technology (KTU) Organic Chemistry laboratories have
developed material which offers much cheaper alternative to the one which is
currently being used in hybrid solar cells. The efficiency of the
semi-conductors created by the team of KTU’s chemists was confirmed at Swiss
Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. The publication on the discovery has
been selected among 5 percent most important papers in Angewandte Chemie
International Edition, which is one of the prime chemistry journals in the
world.
“The material created by us is considerably cheaper and the
process of its synthesis is less complicated than that of the currently used
analogue material. Also, both materials have very similar efficiency of
converting solar energy into electricity. That means that our semiconductors
have similar characteristics to the known alternatives, but are much cheaper”,
says professor Vytautas Getautis, head of the chemistry research group responsible
for the discovery.
The solar cells containing organic semiconductors created at
KTU were constructed and tested by physicists at Lausanne. The tests revealed
outstanding results: the effectivity of the cells’ converting solar energy into
electricity was 16.9 percent. There are only a few organic semiconductors in
the world affording such a high solar cell efficiency.
Prof Getautis says that the material created at KTU will be
used in the construction of future solar cells: almost all solar cells are made
from inorganic semiconductors. Hybrid, semi-organic solar cells are still being
developed and perfected at the research centres all over the world.
KTU and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
registered the invention at the European Patent Office.