共用题干Better Solar Energy Systems: More Heat More

共用题干

Better Solar Energy Systems: More Heat, More Light

Solar photovoltaic thermal energy systems,or PVTs,generate both heat and electricity,but until now they

haven’t been very good at the heat-generating part compared to a stand-alone solar thermal collector.

That’s because they operate at low temperatures to cool crystalline silicon solar cells,which lets the

silicon generate more electricity but isn’t a very efficient way to gather heat.

That’s a problem of economics. Good solar hot-water systems can harvest much more energy than a solar-

electric system at a substantially lower cost. And it’s also a space problem:photovol-taic cells can take

up all the space on the roof,leaving little room for thermal applications.

In a pair of studies,Joshua Pearce,an associate professor of materials science and engineer-ing,has

devised a solution in the form of a better PVT made with a different kind of silicon.His research

collaborators are Kunal Girotra from Thin Silicon in California and Michael Pathak and Stephen Harrison

from Queen’s University,Canada.

Most solar panels are made with crystalline silicon,but you can also make solar cells out of amorphous

silicon,commonly known as thin-film silicon.They don’t create as much electricity, but they are

lighter,flexible,and cheaper. And,because they require much less silicon,they have a greener footprint.

Unfortunately,thin-film silicon solar cells are vulnerable to some bad-news physics in the form of the

Staebler-Wronski effect.

"That means that their efficiency drops when you expose them to light-pretty much the worst possible

effect for a solar cell,"Pearce explains,which is one of the reasons thin-film solar panels make up only a

small fraction of the market.

However,Pearce and his team found a way to engineer around the Staebler-Wronski effect by incorporating

thin-film silicon in a new type of PVT. You don’t have to cool down thin-film silicon to make it work.In

fact,Pearce’s group discovered that by heating it to solar-thermal operating temperatures,near the boiling

point of water,they could make thicker cells that largely overcame the Staebler-Wronski effect. When they

applied the thin-fulm silicon directly to a solar thermal en-ergy collector,they also found that by baking

the cell once a day,they boosted the solar cell’s e-lectrical efficiency by over 10 percent.

PVTs are not efficient in______.

A..creating electricity

B. cooling silicon solar cells

C. generating heat

D. powering solar thermal collectors