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Solar

Projects supervised by: Dr Rolf Crook, Professor Rik Drummond-Brydson, Dr Timothy Foxon, Professor Piers Forster, Dr Dabo Guan, Professor Philip Purnell and Professor Peter Taylor

Researchers: Jamie Bright, Joshua Cottom, Philippa Hardy, David Jacques, Ross Jarrett, Chris Smith

Solar energy incident on the earth is approximately 170,000TW compared to human consumption of 18TW. Therefore harnessing this energy could achieve the entire world’s energy needs. Further to this solar power is able to provide energy in regions for which building grid infrastructure is either impossible or financially unfeasible. However, current PV solar cells have inherent issues such as an approximate 20% conversion efficiency. The Leeds DTC solar group aims to improve all areas of solar cells from the active layer, including new architectures, to efficient charge collection. Finally the group also aims to assess the effects solar has on local climate and the variations that could occur to the solar resource due to climate change.

The DTC and Solar Energy

Work is undertaken to improve the efficiency of solar cells by considering composite materials. This will utilise the unique properties of quantum dots which can produce multiple excitations from a single photon and tune size to extract power over the whole solar spectrum. So far it has been possible to achieve a working schottky junction solar cell using titanium dioxide and gold. The next stages will be to marry this with nanocrystals in various configurations to increase the efficiency of the cell.

Current solar cells often use indium tin oxide transparent conductive electrodes which has issues with materials supply risk and incompatibility with more delicate active layers. Research into silver nanowire meshes aims to provide a riskless and highly efficient alternative.

Finally modelling efforts are undertaken to:

  • Assess the solar potential of cities from a bottom up approach. This utilised surface topology and building shapes to select both financially and environmentally viable sites and included a rating system to include likely uptake of solar.
  • Determine the varying effects of solar flux change due to weather events. This work looks to determine the uncertainty in the Hadley centre climate model’s solar PV output variation with climate change. It looks to include climatic variables such as wind and dust. It will also look at local climate change due to the installation of large PV panel arrays.