Metal-Free Resins Drive Down Cost of Solar Energy
Metal-Free Resins Drive Down Cost of Solar Energy
  • Reporter Park Tae-yoon
  • 승인 2012.11.07 12:40
  • 댓글 0
이 기사를 공유합니다

Professor Wonyong Choi (School of En-vironmental Sci-ence and Engi-neering) develop-ed cheap sensitizer technology using phenolic resins. This material cou-ld replace costly metals in some solar cells.

Dye-sensitised solar cells (DSSCs) are an important class of solar cells, which demonstrate a number of important attributes (such as low cost, flexibility, and good efficiency). Currently, a third of the cost of DSSCs could go towards the noble metal-based dyes used for sensitizing the titania photocatalyst, which allows it to harvest the more useful, visible parts of the spectrum. However, Prof. Choi has replaced these dyes with a simple and cheap phenolic resin. Prof. Choi emphasized, ?his technology will lead to reduce the unit cost of photocatalyst and solar batteries. Based on the research results, we plan to improve the durability and the absorption efficiency by changing the structure of phenolic rosins.
This study was first published on the web of Chemistry World on Sep. 11.