UNSW engineers set a new world record in solar cell efficiency

Engineers at the University of New South Wales have developed a new solar cell configuration that is 34.5 percent efficient at converting unfocused sunlight into electricity. The new solar cell is 44 percent better than the previous record – made by Alta Devices of the USA, which reached 24% efficiency with a larger solar array.

The record was set by Dr Mark Keevers and Professor Martin Green, Senior Research Fellow and Director, respectively, of UNSW’s Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, using a 28-cm2 four-junction mini-module – embedded in a prism – that extracts the maximum energy from sunlight. It does this by splitting the incoming rays into four bands, using a hybrid four-junction receiver to squeeze even more electricity from each beam of sunlight.

“This encouraging result shows that there are still advances to come in photovoltaics research to make solar cells even more efficient,” said Keevers. “Extracting more energy from every beam of sunlight is critical to reducing the cost of electricity generated by solar cells as it lowers the investment needed, and delivering payback faster.”

This is not the first time that the team has set a world record, in 2014 University of New South Wales set a record by achieving an electricity conversion rate of over 40% by using mirrors to concentrate the light – a technique known as CPV (concentrator photovoltaics) – and then similarly splitting out various wavelengths.

“What’s remarkable is that this level of efficiency had not been expected for many years,” said Green, a pioneer who has led the field for much of his 40 years at UNSW. “A recent study by Germany’s Agora Energiewende think tank set an aggressive target of 35% efficiency by 2050 for a module that uses unconcentrated sunlight, such as the standard ones on family homes.”

“So things are moving faster in solar cell efficiency than many experts expected, and that’s good news for solar energy,” he added. “But we must maintain the pace of photovoltaic research in Australia to ensure that we not only build on such tremendous results, but continue to bring benefits back to Australia.”

The record-setting UNSW mini-module combines a silicon cell on one face of a glass prism, with a triple-junction solar cell on the other.

The triple-junction cell targets discrete bands of the incoming sunlight, using a combination of three layers: indium-gallium-phosphide; indium-gallium-arsenide; and germanium. As sunlight passes through each layer, energy is extracted by each junction at its most efficient wavelength, while the unused part of the light passes through to the next layer, and so on.

Some of the infrared band of incoming sunlight, unused by the triple-junction cell, is filtered out and bounced onto the silicon cell, thereby extracting just about all of the energy from each beam of sunlight hitting the mini-module.

The 34.5% result with the 28 cm2 mini-module is already a world record, but scaling it up to a larger 800-cm2 – thereby leaping beyond Alta Devices’ 24% – is well within reach.

“There’ll be some marginal loss from interconnection in the scale-up, but we are so far ahead that it’s entirely feasible,” Keevers said. “The theoretical limit for such a four-junction device is thought to be 53%, which puts the UNSW result two-thirds of the way there.”

The research is supported by $1.4 million grant funding from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

UNSW team is working with another ARENA-supported company, RayGen, to explore how the advanced receiver could be rolled out at concentrated solar PV power plants.

Other research partners working with UNSW include Trina Solar, a PV module manufacturer and the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

Multi-junction solar cells of this type are unlikely to find their way onto the rooftops of homes and offices soon, as they require more effort to manufacture and therefore cost more than standard crystalline silicon cells with a single junction. But the UNSW team is working on new techniques to reduce the manufacturing complexity, and create cheaper multi-junction cells.