FOTOTHERM

The work led by Matthew Escarra, associate professor of physics and engineering physics at Tulane, and Daniel Codd, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of San Diego, is the culmination of a U.S. Department of Energy ARPA-E project that began in 2014 with $3.3 million in funding and involved years of prototype development at Tulane and field testing in San Diego. The research is detailed this month in the science journal  Cell Reports Physical Science . Researchers from San Diego State University, Boeing-Spectrolab and Otherlab were also part of the project. "Thermal energy consumption is a huge piece of the global energy economy -- much larger than electricity use. There has been a rising interest in solar combined heat and power systems to deliver both electricity and process heat for zero-net-energy and greenhouse-gas-free development," said Escarra. The hybrid converter utilizes an approach that more fully captures the whole spectrum of s...

Although perovskites are a promising alternative to the silicon used to make most of today's solar cells, new manufacturing processes are needed to make them practical for commercial production. To help fill this gap, researchers have developed a new precision spray-coating method that enables more complex perovskite solar cell designs and could be scaled up for mass production. Perovskites are promising for next-generation solar cells because they absorb light and convert it to energy with better efficiency and potentially lower production costs than silicon. Perovskites can even be sprayed onto glass to create energy-producing windows. "Our work demonstrates a process to deposit perovskite layer by layer with controllable thicknesses and rates of deposition for each layer," said research team leader Pongsakorn Kanjanaboos from the School of Materials Science and Innovation, Faculty of Science, Mahidol University in Thailand. "This new method enables stacked d...