Tel Aviv University's Department of Physical Electronics' Renewable Energy Center has demonstrated that a tried and true technology can meet or exceed traditional solar collecting panels in producing electricity. Professor Koby Scheuer is using, as he put it, "old school" metallic antennas to collect light based energy. The team's findings were presented at Photonics West earlier this year.
Electromagnetic energy comes in many forms, and they are all present in light. The key to the solar collecting with this method is to tune the antenna to the mico-wavelengths of each component. For example, visible light has wavelengths between 400nm and 700nm. Only recently has manufacturing technology been fine enough to build components less than a micron.
In tests, the team would absorb light at a certain frequency using the antenna, and then re-emit the signal. The idea was to see how much of the energy was lost in the transition. The results show that only a 5% loss of energy was experienced in the circuit.
The ultimate goal is to collect energy from a wide spectrum, from ultra-violet to infrared. The wavelengths vary from as low as 50nm to 10um. The antenna arrays to collect this energy will be housed in a plastic sheet using a nano-imprinting lithography machine. The antennas are made of aluminum with a small amount of gold. The team boasts that the cost to build such a panel will be a fraction of the price compared to silicon cells.
Sounds like the tech has a high potential for the energy industry. However, no word on its actual light to energy efficiency. Current solar panels convert somewhere between 1 to 15% of the light energy, depending on the construction type. The Tel Aviv team stated that their panel will be more efficient than the best silicon cell available today.
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