this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Breakthrough barium titanate solar panels are 1000x more powerful than existing panels (www.thebrighterside.news)
submitted 3 months ago by SteveKLord@slrpnk.net to c/energy@slrpnk.net
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Researchers at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) have discovered a new method to increase the efficiency of solar cells by a factor of 1,000. The team of scientists achieved this breakthrough by creating crystalline layers of barium titanate, strontium titanate, and calcium titanate, which were alternately placed on top of one another in a lattice structure.

Their findings, which could revolutionize the solar energy industry, were recently published in the journal Science Advances.

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[–] Tiresia@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 months ago

"Strong current flow" is informal language, but both it and photoresponse refer to the electrical power that comes out. In theory you would just divide that by the incoming solar flux and get the efficiency. For now it's only in a lab setting, though, so we'll have to see what the practical efficiency will be if this is actually incorporated into a reasonable solar cell.

So yeah, apparently barium titanate solar panels used to be extremely terrible, and now they might become competitive with further research.