High-Efficiency Photovoltaic Cells Developed

The cells developed by the UPC researchers have surpassed the 15% barrier -- the average efficiency of the most common photovoltaic cells. Specifically, a conversion efficiency (of incident light to electric power) of 20.5% has been achieved, which means the energy produced per unit of area can be increased by one third.

For example, thanks to the high efficiency of this new cell type, only 4.8 m² of photovoltaic panels would be needed to meet one family's annual energy needs (an average of about 4 kWh per day). This compares to an area of 6.5 m² for traditional cells.

The cells are made of crystalline silicon and work in a simple way, much as conventional cells do. The light captured by the cells generates charges that are drawn off at the panel contacts and transformed into an electric current."The goal is to generate a lot of charges that don't get lost -- that make it to the contacts," says Alcubilla, a member of the research group. Finally, after the light from the sun has been converted into electric current, it is fed into the power grid for domestic and industrial use.

The key to the success of the project was therefore to minimize losses, and by pursuing this approach the UPC researchers have managed to produce the most efficient silicon cells in Spain."We've done a lot of work on the conception and development of new materials and structures, and on the technology needed to optimize the entire process and achieve high levels of efficiency," says Alcubilla. The next step is to develop procedures that facilitate large-scale production.

The result achieved in this research (which has involved 38 trials since 2002) is comparable to those obtained in other research projects carried out in countries that are taking the lead in the field of photovoltaic energy. The maximum efficiency obtained for cells of this type is 24.7%, a record set by an Australian group at the University of New South Wales.

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New Wave: Efficient Source of Terahertz Radiation Developed

JILA is a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Terahertz radiation -- which falls between the radio and optical bands of the electromagnetic spectrum -- penetrates materials such as clothing and plastic but can be used to detect many substances that have unique absorption characteristics at these wavelengths. Terahertz systems are challenging to build because they require a blend of electronic and optical methods.

The JILA technology, described inOptics Letters,* is a new twist on a common terahertz source, a semiconductor surface patterned with metal electrodes and excited by ultrafast laser pulses. An electric field is applied across the semiconductor while near-infrared pulses lasting about 70 femtoseconds (quadrillionths of a second), produced 89 million times per second, dislodge electrons from the semiconductor. The electrons accelerate in the electric field and emit waves of terahertz radiation.

The JILA innovations eliminate two known problems with these devices. Adding a layer of silicon oxide insulation between the gallium arsenide semiconductor and the gold electrodes prevents electrons from becoming trapped in semiconductor crystal defects and producing spikes in the electric field. Making the electric field oscillate rapidly by applying a radiofrequency signal ensures that electrons generated by the light cannot react quickly enough to cancel the electric field.

The result is a uniform electric field over a large area, enabling the use of a large laser beam spot size and enhancing system efficiency. Significantly, users can boost terahertz power by raising the optical power without damaging the semiconductor. Sample damage was common with previous systems, even at low power. Among other advantages, the new technique does not require a microscopically patterned sample or high-voltage electronics. The system produces a peak terahertz field (20 volts per centimeter for an input power of 160 milliwatts) comparable to that of other methods.

While there are a number of different ways to generate terahertz radiation, systems using ultrafast lasers and semiconductors are commercially important because they offer an unusual combination of broad frequency range, high frequencies, and high intensity output.

NIST has applied for a provisional patent on the new technology. The system currently uses a large laser based on a titanium-doped sapphire crystal but could be made more compact by use of a different semiconductor and a smaller fiber laser, says senior author Steven Cundiff, a NIST physicist.

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World Can Be Powered by Alternative Energy, Using Today's Technology, in 20-40 Years, Experts Say

According to a new study coauthored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.

"Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering."It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper inEnergy Policyin which they assess the costs, technology and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters -- no more natural gas or coal -- and water would be preheated by the sun.

Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water and sun would power the world.

The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water and solar, and by 2050, all pre-existing energy production would be converted as well.

"We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure -- for all purposes -- with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years," said Jacobson.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

"When you actually account for all the costs to society -- including medical costs -- of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today," Jacobson said.

One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide"base load" energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.

Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.

"The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle," he said."If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand."

Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.

"One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites," said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.

"With a system that is 100 percent wind, water and solar, you can't use normal methods for matching supply and demand. You have to have what people call a supergrid, with long-distance transmission and really good management," he said.

Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.

Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.

Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.

They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.

"For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch," Jacobson said."Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those."

Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal and wave-energy installations.

They found that to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.

One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.

"Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming," Jacobson said."The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world's energy is less than the area of Manhattan." If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.

Jacobson said that about 1 percent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.

"This really involves a large scale transformation," he said."It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system."

"But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies," Jacobson said."We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society."

Jacobson is the director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.

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Tuning Graphene Film So It Sheds Water

These are some of the potential applications for graphene, one of the hottest new materials in the field of nanotechnology, raised by the research of James Dickerson, assistant professor of physics at Vanderbilt.

Dickerson and his colleagues have figured out how to create a freestanding film of graphene oxide and alter its surface roughness so that it either causes water to bead up and run off or causes it to spread out in a thin layer.

"Graphene films are transparent and, because they are made of carbon, they are very inexpensive to make," Dickerson said."The technique that we use can be rapidly scaled up to produce it in commercial quantities."

His approach is documented in an article published online by the journalACS Nanoon Nov. 26.

Graphene is made up of sheets of carbon atoms arranged in rings -- something like molecular chicken wire. Not only is this one of the thinnest materials possible, but it is 10 times stronger than steel and conducts electricity better at room temperature than any other known material. Graphene's exotic properties have attracted widespread scientific interest, but Dickerson is one of the first to investigate how it interacts with water.

Many scientists studying graphene make it using a dry method, called"mechanical cleavage," that involves rubbing or scraping graphite against a hard surface. The technique produces sheets that are both extremely thin and extremely fragile. Dickerson's method can produce sheets equally as thin but considerable stronger than those made by other techniques. It is already used commercially to produce a variety of different coatings and ceramics. Known as electrophoretic deposition, this"wet" technique combines an electric field within a liquid medium to create nanoparticle films that can be transferred to another surface.

Dickerson and his colleagues found that they could change the manner in which the graphene oxide particles assemble into a film by varying the pH of the liquid medium and the electric voltage used in the process. One pair of settings lay down the particles in a"rug" arrangement that creates a nearly atomically smooth surface. A different pair of settings causes the particles to clump into tiny"bricks" forming a bumpy and uneven surface. The researchers determined that the rug surface causes water to spread out in a thin layer, while the brick surface causes water to bead up and run off.

Dickerson is pursuing an approach that could create film that enhances these water-associated properties, making them even more effective at either spreading out water or causing it to bead up and run off. There is considerable academic and commercial interest in the development of coatings with these enhanced properties, called super-hydrophobic and super-hydrophilic. Potential applications range from self-cleaning glasses and clothes to antifogging surfaces to corrosion protection and snow-load protection on buildings. However, effective, low-cost and durable coatings have yet to make it out of the laboratory.

Dickerson's idea is to apply his basic procedure to"fluorographene" -- a fluorinated version of graphene that is a two-dimensional version of Teflon -- recently produced by Kostya S. Novoselov and Andre K. Geim at the University of Manchester, who received the 2010 Nobel Prize for the discovery of graphene. Normal fluorographene under tension should be considerably more effective in repelling water than graphene oxide. So there is a good chance a"brick" version and a"rug" version would have extreme water-associated effects, Dickerson figures.

Graduate students Saad Hasan, John Rigueur, Robert Harl and Alex Krejci, postdoctoral research scientist Isabel Gonzalo-Juan and Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Bridget R. Rogers contributed to the research, which was funded by a Vanderbilt Discovery grant and by the National Science Foundation.

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Graphene and 'Spintronics' Combo Looks Promising

Graphene, a two-dimensional crystalline form of carbon, is being touted as a sort of"Holy Grail" of materials. It boasts properties such as a breaking strength 200 times greater than steel and, of great interest to the semiconductor and data storage industries, electric currents that can blaze through it 100 times faster than in silicon.

Spintronic devices are being hotly pursued because they promise to be smaller, more versatile, and much faster than today's electronics."Spin" is a quantum mechanical property that arises when a particle's intrinsic rotational momentum creates a tiny magnetic field. And spin has a direction, either"up" or"down." The direction can encode data in the 0s and 1s of the binary system, with the key here being that spin-based data storage doesn't disappear when the electric current stops.

"There is strong research interest in spintronic devices that process information using electron spins, because these novel devices offer better performance than traditional electronic devices and will likely replace them one day," says Kwok Sum Chan, professor of physics at the City University of Hong Kong"Graphene is an important material for spintronic devices because its electron spin can maintain its direction for a long time and, as a result, information stored isn't easily lost."

It is, however, difficult to generate a spin current in graphene, which would be a key part of carrying information in a graphene spintronic device. Chan and colleagues came up with a method to do just that. It involves using spin splitting in monolayer graphene generated by ferromagnetic proximity effect and adiabatic (a process that is slow compared to the speed of the electrons in the device) quantum pumping. They can control the degree of polarization of the spin current by varying the Fermi energy (the level in the distribution of electron energies in a solid at which a quantum state is equally likely to be occupied or empty), which they say is very important for meeting various application requirements.

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Scientists Develop 3-D Model of the Ionosphere F-Region

Developed by Dr. Joseph Huba and Dr. Glenn Joyce at the NRL Plasma Physics Division, SAMI3 is a fully three-dimensional model of the low- to mid-latitude ionosphere. SAMI3 has been modified recently to use a sun-fixed coordinate system to eliminate rotation of the dawn-dusk line and a high-resolution longitudinal grid to capture the evolution of equatorial plasma bubbles in the pre- to post-sunset sector.

The new modeling capability with SAMI3 has found that ESF can be triggered by pre-sunset ionospheric density perturbations and that an existing ESF plasma bubble can trigger a new bubble.

"Understanding and modeling ESF is important because of its impact on space weather," said Dr. Joseph Huba, head of the Space Plasma Physics Section of the Beam Physics Branch."ESF anomalies can cause radio wave scintillation that degrades communication and navigation systems and serves as the primary focus of the Air Force Communications/ Navigation Outage Forecast System.

Post-sunset ionospheric irregularities in the equatorialF-region were first observed in 1938 by terrestrial magnetism researchers, H.G. Booker and H.W. Wells at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. During that time, analysis of the scattering of radio waves by theF-region of the ionosphere at an equatorial location (Huancayo, Peru) revealed ESF is fundamentally a nighttime event, with greatest frequency of occurrence in the period from four hours before midnight to four hours after midnight.

"The ionosphere builds up after sunrise and reaches a maximum electron density in mid-afternoon, said Huba."Subsequently, the ionosphere can be lifted to higher altitudes just after sunset because of the pre-reversal enhancement of the eastward electric field. During this time the ionosphere can become unstable."

TheF-region of the ionosphere is home to theF-layer, or Appleton layer, and is the densest part of the ionosphere as it extends from about 200 km to more than 500 km above the surface of Earth. Beyond this layer is the topside ionosphere. Here extreme ultraviolet solar radiation ionizes atomic oxygen. TheF-layer consists of one layer at night, but during the day, a deformation often forms creating layers labeledF₁andF₂. TheF-region is the region of the ionosphere that is very important for high-frequency (HF) radio wave propagation facilitating HF radio communications over long distances.

The upgraded version of SAMI3 represents a unique resource to investigate the physics of equatorial spreadF, particularly the processes that control the day-to-day variability of ESFs. Future improvements to the current model include: modification to the geomagnetic field to have a tilt allowing the inclusion of longitudinal effects; coupling SAMI3 with a physics-based model of the thermosphere; and replacement of the full donor cell algorithm, currently being used for crossfield transport, with a high-order flux transport algorithm allowing for the capture of complex bubble evolution involving bifurcation.

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Better Turbine Spacing for Large Wind Farms

To help steer wind farm owners in the right direction, Charles Meneveau, a Johns Hopkins fluid mechanics and turbulence expert, working with a colleague in Belgium, has devised a new formula through which the optimal spacing for a large array of turbines can be obtained.

"I believe our results are quite robust," said Meneveau, who is the Louis Sardella Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the university's Whiting School of Engineering."They indicate that large wind farm operators are going to have to space their turbines farther apart."

The newest wind farms, which can be located on land or offshore, typically use turbines with rotor diameters of about 300 feet. Currently, turbines on these large wind farms are spaced about seven rotor diameters apart. The new spacing model developed by Meneveau and Johan Meyers, an assistant professor at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium, suggests that placing the wind turbines 15 rotor diameters apart -- more than twice as far apart as in the current layouts -- results in more cost-efficient power generation.

Meneveau presented the study results recently at a meeting of the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics. Meyers, co-author of the study, was unable to attend.

The research is important because large wind farms -- consisting of hundreds or even thousands of turbines -- are planned or already operating in the western United States, Europe and China."The early experience is that they are producing less power than expected," Meneveau said."Some of these projects are underperforming."

Earlier computational models for large wind farm layouts were based on simply adding up what happens in the wakes of single wind turbines, Meneveau said. The new spacing model, he said, takes into account interaction of arrays of turbines with the entire atmospheric wind flow.

Meneveau and Meyers argue that the energy generated in a large wind farm has less to do with horizontal winds and is more dependent on the strong winds that the turbulence created by the tall turbines pulls down from higher up in the atmosphere. Using insights gleaned from high-performance computer simulations as well as from wind tunnel experiments, they determined that in the correct spacing, the turbines alter the landscape in a way that creates turbulence, which stirs the air and helps draw more powerful kinetic energy from higher altitudes.

The experiments were conducted in the Johns Hopkins wind tunnel, which uses a large fan to generate a stream of air. Before it enters the testing area, the air passes through an"active grid," a curtain of perforated plates that rotate randomly and create turbulence so that the air moving through the tunnel more closely resembles real-life wind conditions.

Air currents in the tunnel pass through a series of small three-bladed model wind turbines mounted atop posts, mimicking an array of full-size wind turbines. Data concerning the interaction of the air currents and the model turbines is collected by using a measurement procedure called stereo particle-image-velocimetry, which requires a pair of high-resolution digital cameras, smoke and laser pulses.

Further research is needed, Meneveau said, to learn how varying temperatures can affect the generation of power on large wind farms. The Johns Hopkins professor has applied for continued funding to conduct such studies.

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