Xiamen University successfully developed a new solar cell

In view of the short life of silicon batteries, Xiamen University has successfully developed a new type of solar cell, which uses two wide bandgap semiconductor materials, zinc oxide and zinc selenide, as solar cells, which greatly stabilizes the performance of solar cells and extends their lifetime.

This result was recently published in the "Journal of Materials Chemistry" of the Royal Society of Chemistry. This is the first time in the world that wide bandgap semiconductors have been used in solar cells.

At present, silicon solar cells are widely used in solar cells, but their lifetime is limited.

In 2005, experts from the Semiconductor Photonics Center of Xiamen University focused their attention on wide bandgap semiconductors with stable physical and chemical properties, good radiation resistance and long lifetime, and devoted themselves to the research of wide bandgap semiconductors in solar cell applications.

According to Professor Kang Junyong of Xiamen University, the wider the bandgap of wide bandgap semiconductors, the more stable the physical and chemical properties, the better the radiation resistance, and the longer the lifespan; but correspondingly, a disadvantage of the wide bandgap is the material The absorption of sunlight is less and the photoelectric conversion efficiency is low.

Due to this "fatal defect," wide bandgap semiconductor material has not been used as a key structure for power generation in solar cells in the past, but only as an electrode. After in-depth study, the research group chose two kinds of wide bandgap semiconductor materials—zinc oxide and zinc selenide as the material of solar cells, and innovated the preparation method to achieve coherent growth of the two materials, which greatly reduced the effective band of wide bandgap semiconductors. Gap increases the range of absorbing sunlight.

At the same time, they changed the laminar film form into a one-by-one coaxial form, each having only 200 nanometers. As a result, the area of ​​light absorption has increased substantially, and the absorption rate of wide bandgap semiconductors has also increased, successfully breaking the bottleneck that restricts conversion.