Efficiency

Perovskite is quickly gaining on silicon in the solar cell field, but it has one major drawback – durability. Now, a new treatment has been shown to keep perovskite solar cells working at 99% of their efficiency after 1,000 hours of use.

The dynamic duo of silicon and perovskite continue their rampage through the solar cell industry. Researchers at KAUST have developed a new silicon/perovskite tandem solar cell with a record-breaking efficiency.

3D concrete printing (3DCP) technology is already known to offer a more efficient approach to constructing buildings. A new type of 3DCP is said to be better, resulting in walls that are a claimed 72% lighter than their conventional counterparts.

Perovskite and silicon are proving to be a formidable duo in the world of solar cells, and now they’ve hit a new record efficiency. A team at Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin (HZB) have developed solar cells with an efficiency of over 32%.

It's easy to think of shipping containers as simple metal boxes, that can't be improved. The Unit One container, however, is claimed to be lighter, stronger and more energy-efficient than others, plus it uses multiple sensors to monitor its cargo.

This wonderfully odd idea appears to have genuine potential to radically improve the power, speed, efficiency, payload capacity, range, endurance and ground footprint of a wide range of VTOL aircraft and drones. We've never seen anything quite like it.

Solar cells still have plenty of room for improvement. Researchers at New York University Tandon have now developed thin film that boosts solar cell efficiency by converting wasted wavelengths of light into ones that can produce energy.

Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have broken the world record for solar cell efficiency. Reaching almost 40 percent, the new device boasts the highest efficiency recorded for any type of solar cell in real-world conditions.

Perovskite solar cells have come a long way in a short time, but there’s still room for improvement. Engineers have now added a layer of quantum dots to the recipe, resulting in a more stable solar cell with near-record efficiency.

When objects are being 3D printed, they often have to include supportive structures that are subsequently discarded. A new print bed, however, is designed to eliminate the need for such structures, thus reducing both waste and printing time.

When you're laser-cutting parts for a build project, you obviously want to be as efficient as possible. A new MIT-created program is designed to help, by optimizing the manner in which parts are cut from sheets of raw material.

A touch of chili peppers can spice up just about any dish – and maybe, it turns out, even solar cells. Researchers have now found that adding a sprinkle of capsaicin to a perovskite precursor can improve the efficiency of solar cells.