Installation of solar panels is escalating in the United States, with early 2019 observing over 2 Million new installations—a record-high count, as per the latest Solar Energy Industries Association and Wood Mackenzie Power & Renewables report.
An engineers’ team from the Washington University, St Louis, found the KBaTeBiO6, a bismuth-halide double perovskite, material to be having potential among the 30,000 candidates bismuth-including oxides. The team reached this conclusion utilizing high-throughput quantum-mechanical density functional theory (DFT) calculations and data analytics.
Researcher Rohan Mishra stated, “We discovered that this seemed to be the most steady substance and that it can be produced in the laboratory.” Further, Shalinee Kavadiya from the Arizona State University coped to synthesize it following 6 Months of hard work utilizing wet-chemistry. She said, “While a majority of oxides are likely to have a wide band, we anticipated the new compound to have a low band gap—that is somewhere near to the halide perovskites—as well as practically good properties.”
“Once it was synthesized as predicted by us, it was steady and had a band gap of 1.88 eV,” said Mishra, who explained the finding as a good foremost step to non-toxic solar cells—pinpointing that a majority of potential solar cells compounds have a band gap of ~1.5 eV.
As per the supplementary data issued together with the study, x-ray diffraction analysis proposes that a powder sample has not considerably altered after 380 Days of ambient storage. Further, the researchers will examine the role of any faults in this new semiconductor and try finding more sophisticated synthesis methods.
Likewise, IIT Hyderabad researchers have built environment-friendly, low-priced, solar cells by using an off-the-shelf dye utilized to make vermilion, or kumkum, in India. The dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC) is derived from New Fuchsin dye with platinum-free counter electrodes and aqueous electrolytes, as per the study issued in the Solar Energy journal.
