The sun is an abundant but still largely underutilized source of energy.
With the push for renewable energy, researchers at Clemson University and the Indian Institute of Science have developed a new stack of metal oxides (vanadium pentoxide and zinc oxide) that can efficiently collect and simultaneously store energy from sunlight. used to design a smart supercapacitor.
Like batteries, supercapacitors store and release electricity. But unlike batteries, supercapacitors do not require a chemical reaction to store energy. Instead, the charge is stored electrostatically, allowing the supercapacitor to charge and discharge rapidly. This research may pave the way for future self-charging appliances such as health monitoring devices.
Solar energy is renewable, but one of the challenges is that the energy must be harvested during the day when the sun is out and stored for future use. Traditionally, this required two separate devices. Having both makes the whole system bulky. Professor Abha Misra’s lab at the Indian Institute of Science and his researchers at the Clemson Nanomaterials Institute (CNI) have developed his smart device that converts and stores light into electrical energy, reducing its bulk.
Zinc oxide has been widely used in light-dependent charge transfer applications such as photovoltaics and photocatalysis due to its low cost, high carrier mobility, long carrier diffusion, ease of synthesis on substrates, and non-toxicity. rice field. It has electron-transporting and hole-blocking properties and readily generates photoexcited electrons upon light irradiation. However, its wide bandgap limits its utility to narrow optical spectra and requires new strategies to improve its performance.
unique structure
The researchers stacked vanadium pentoxide and zinc oxide to create a unique heterostructure that improved on past materials’ ability to convert light into electrical energy. In a test that measures its ability to store collected light, the new device beat his previous record by a factor of four.
“We have come up with a 2-in-1 device that not only collects light more efficiently, but stores it as electrical energy, unlike other systems in existence today.” researcher. “The materials we chose allowed us to engineer the bandgap in such a way that the conversion of light to electricity was very efficient.”
Researchers found that the devices exhibited excellent electrochemical performance and stability over 5,000 cycles.
propulsion
“What we’re essentially doing here is trying to capture all the energy in the natural world around us,” said CNI’s founding director and physics and astronomy department at the University of Science. Apparao Rao, RA Bowen Professor of Physics at “We have plenty of sunshine. The driving force behind our research is to open the door to technologies other than solar cells, which are already a mature field, to harness the energy that is all around us.”
Original: Harnessing the power of the sun: Researchers design smart supercapacitors that harvest and store solar energy
Than: Clemson University | Indian Institute of Science
