A Dartmouth Engineering-led study published in Joule reported the invention of a wholly latest high-performance material for solar absorbers — the central a part of a solar cell that turns light into electricity — that’s stable and earth-abundant. The researchers used a singular high-throughput computational screening method to speed up the invention process and were capable of quickly evaluate roughly 40,000 known candidate materials.
“That is the primary example in the sector of photovoltaics where a brand new material has been found through one of these approach with an experimental follow-up,” said Geoffroy Hautier, Dartmouth’s Hodgson Family Associate Professor of Engineering. “Most individuals study one or two materials at a time, and we checked out forty thousand.”
Dartmouth researcher Zhenkun Yuan is first creator on the study with co-authors including research associate Yihuang Xiong, engineering PhD candidates Gideon Kassa and Andrew Pike, and engineering professors Hautier and Jifeng Liu — in addition to researchers from eight other partner institutions. This research stems from an award Hautier and Liu received in 2022 as a part of $540 million the US Department of Energy granted to universities and National Laboratories nationwide to develop clean-energy technologies, including latest photovoltaic materials.
The solar absorber material was confirmed within the lab to be not only promising in its ability to efficiently transform light into electricity, but in addition highly stable in each air and water. “You possibly can put it out for six months and it’s going to stay the identical,” Hautier said. “Once you do not have to fret about moisture and air contamination, that significantly reduces your costs.”
The study points out that, normally, finding latest solar materials is tedious and slow with an awesome variety of options to even begin to contemplate.
“We have been constructing a database of known materials — each naturally occurring and human-made — for a very long time,” Hautier explained. “That is giving us the aptitude to rapidly screen and make decisions on what may or will not be useful. We weren’t capable of screen for stability, but we could narrow it all the way down to roughly 20 reasonable solar materials — among the many hundreds and hundreds of possibilities — and after talking with our colleagues, we had a sense this one can be stable.”
The team plans to proceed to enhance the tools for even higher screening, in addition to explore all the family of materials they call “Zintls,” which may lead to enhancements and optimizations of the discovered material.
“There are a whole lot of opportunities around further characterizing this material and understanding it higher, equivalent to the way it absorbs light and easy methods to make it as a skinny film,” said Liu, who conducts and oversees materials-testing in his lab. “Collaboration is crucial. It takes a complete community of thinkers and many alternative skills to make all of it work — computing, experimentation, fabrication, characterization, optimization — and you want to put all that together in a team.”
“We can’t have it as a solar panel tomorrow,” Hautier said, “but we expect this family of materials is phenomenal and value taking a look at.”
